I arrived at work such that I clocked in a couple of minutes late--11:04 to be exact--and proceeded to...check my e-mail, review my training status (still 100%), and start working on Geek Squad Certification of a returned laptop.
The first few hours dragged past.
Things sped up after the morning folks left and the afternoon shift (me and another guy) moved into working the GS counter. I had a couple of laptop setups to do, nothing major, but they took a long time because our internal WiFi was running slow.
One was a Mac. And I'll tell you now, that thing was annoying as hell. I was just trying to install MS Office on the thing, but it has to download from MS and the download was dying after about fifteen minutes or less.
After trying repeatedly to get the damned install image downloaded, I discovered that if the thing went into any kind of powersave mode at all--screen turned off, hard drive spun down, anything--it would kill the download and there was no way to restart it. The power saver was set not to do that if there was network access taking place, but for some reason the thing was ignoring that setting. I had to set everything to "never power down" in order to get the download to complete.
This is "ease of use"?
Now, when you do a big download on a Windows machine, it won't give up just because the hard drive spun down or a screensaver came on. GetRight was a necessity in, say, 1995, but these days the browsers incorporate that kind of algorithm and you don't need special software, especially if you have a persistent Internet connection.
But after all that, I got the damned software downloaded, so that's done.
Things rolled off a bit after about 8-ish so I was able to clean up the place a bit, and then I learned that the store was closing at 10 rather than 11 as I'd assumed. About 10:08 my boss told me I could go, so I didn't argue with her and left with a song on my lips and a spring in my step.
The best part of today was lunch: they had Subway catering today, so for my lunch I was able to sit in the breakroom and eat about 16" worth of BMT and Subway Club sandwiches. I haven't had a BMT in forever, so that was a welcome treat for me--and I needed those calories.
My feet--my feet hurt a bit, but not nearly as much as I'd feared they would. I expect that to be a different story tomorrow about this time, though, as I get to go back and do it all over again for Saturday. Whee!
...except I don't need to be in at 11 AM tomorrow; I get to go in a little later.
The only thing that upsets me is learning that there was a doorbuster sale on 24" monitors--they were $99, damn it. *sigh* Oh well.
* * *
GE is 3D printing engine parts. Not prototypes but production parts. If they can make this work--and I doubt they're planning to waste money chasing chimerae--then it means a new step forward for manufacturing.
There are some very exciting things going on in the industrial automation arena.
* * *
So now it's the Christmas shopping season. Are we having fun yet?