It’s fall. That means cooler weather, football, leaves turning, canning and thoughts of Christmas.
Well, almost.
We broke a tradition this year. Our canner and our juicer are staying put on the shelf. Not a quart of peaches, or apples or our famous grape juice.
It’s not because we didn’t have the fruit. There were grapes to be had for the picking. An entire apple orchard about two blocks from house has gone unpicked two years in a row. We could literally pick more than we could can in a month.
I’m not completely sure why we aren’t canning this year. It was just. . .too much. One more thing. It’s been a busy summer. I’ve travelled nearly every other week. My lovely wife has kept house and home together even has her health has gone up and down.
My aunt has the grapes. Each year she tells me when they are ripe. She lives in Salt Lake City, about 30 miles from us. Picking grapes is simple, if somewhat tedious. And the process of turning it into juice is a simple process that I actually enjoy. It takes about an hour per gallon. We typically picked about 4 bushels and got about 13 gallons out of that.
Last year we did about 8 bushels and 25 gallons. We still have plenty. I guess we won’t miss not having the 2019 season canned. We’ve still got plenty of the 2018 to last.
Applesause are best done as a family affair. It’s much more involved than grapes. It takes hours and a lot of people. We have the people, but we just aren’t up to getting everything put in place.
Does this mean we are getting old? Or tired? Or perhaps both.
We aren’t really cancelling the tradition, only postponing it. Or so, I’m telling myself now. We’ll see next year.
However, I have started in on keeping track of another tradition. Readers of these scribblings know I love to work on cars. Even this weekend I changed the oil in one, ordered parts for two others. Helped my daughter fill the AC on hers. And I didn’t get half of the items on my car list completed. That’s the beauty of having running cars; you can afford to only get part way through the list.
But, I also enjoy woodworking. In fact, I have often created Christmas gifts in my workshop. My most complex project was a footlocker that I designed and built. I’ve actually built three. The first one I made for one of my sons. It was the first one I’d ever done. I tend to build things according to the “Helicoptor Standard.”
HELICOPTOR STANDARD: Built strong enough to support a helicoptor.
It meant his footlocker was strong. . .and heavy. With the later ones I managed to keep the strength and cut down on the weight.
I actually haven’t done much with woodworking for over a year. I have a multi-function woodworking tool called a Shopsmith. It’s a tablesaw, a drillpress, a bandsaw, and several other tools. It’s been broken. It would start, but as soon as I put it underload, as soon as I actually tried to do anything with it, it would blow my circuit breaker. The Shopsmith weights about 200 lbs and isn’t easy to move. I threw a tarp over it and thought, “I’ll get to it someday.”
This weekend was someday. I pulled the motor out to figure out what was broken. Being a woodworking tool, it was very dusty. First thing I had to do was blow off 20 years of sawdust and dirt.
When I finished blowing all the sawdust off, the motor looked fine. Because it was. Turns out that was literally all it needed. I put it back into the housing and I no longer had an excuse to not start in on Christmas gifts.
I’m building more footlockers year. Along with shelves and boxes and maybe some some carved names. Yesterday I completed a support platform for our garage deep freezer. It was a simple project and supported by 4×4 posts. Yes, I’m pretty confident a helicoptor could land on it.
A few years ago we had a Christmas where everyone made handmade gifts for each other. We draw names for Christmas. But, it’s a secret who has your name. One of my daughters had me make a pencil holder shaped like a car for her to give to the person who’s name she had.
Yup, I got a car shaped pencil holder for Christmas that year.
So, we’ll continue some traditions this year and skip some other ones. The point is to make the traditions brighten the holidays. If they are a chore, it defeats the entire purpose of having them in the first place.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Back when the Internet was young and Microsoft was King of The Mountain, I worked for the “evil empire.” It was a different time. I was there from 1994 to 2002. It feels like a a lifetime ago. In Internet, or IT time, it was.
It was also a different time in terms of what companies could get away with. I spent several years on the Microsoft Exchange team. Brian Valentine was the VP over Exchange. The team took it’s direction from him.
Brian wasn’t much of a believer in following rules. He held Ship-It parties that were legendary within Microsoft. The Art Department had to ask for a Ship It schedule so they knew when to remove the paintings and statues from Building 43 before the drunken rowdiness started.
There was one statue too large to move. It was a circle of stones walls. During a Ship It party, someone decided it would be a good idea to fill the circle with water. It was probably several hundred gallons. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the art structure hadn’t been on top of the parking garage.
In addition to legendary shipping parties Brian also had a Friday afternoon meetings. They were mandatory. They also provided taxis for anyone who wanted one afterward. (This was before Uber and Lyft.) The meetings were just an excuse to have another party, complete with beer. I loved those parties.
I don’t drink.
I’m travelling to the Philippines next month for a business meeting. I’ll be there all week to justify the time and expense of going. I’m going because part of our team is in the Philippines. In fact, many of our teams are at least partially based overseas.
A friend on another team reached out recently.
I heard you will be in the Philippines next month?
Yeah, I’ll be there for about a week.
We should get together and have a beer.
That would be great. I don’t drink beer, but it would be great to meet.
I’m more of a whisky drinker.
Actually, I don’t drink alcohol at all. It’s kind of a religious thing. But, I love bars.
It’s true. I’m a huge fan of bars. I love the atmosphere. I love the ambiance. (Okay, those mean the same thing, but they sound different.) Maybe it’s because my grandparents’ home had a bar. One back room was literally a bar room. It had dark panelling, A 15′ bar. Neon bar pictures. I don’t remember sneaking any of the alcohol. My cousins do so maybe I did too. Anyway, my memories of that room are about family gatherings and happy times. Maybe that’s why.
all I know is that I’ve always felt comfortable in a bar room.
And I never drink.
Many of my friends also do not drink. However, unlike me, they don’t feel comfortable in a bar, or even around alcohol. (Probably because their grandparents didn’t have a bar room in their house.)
While I like bars, I don’t much care for drunks. I don’t find “drunk” videos funny. I feel sorry for people who cannot control their urges and so end up allowing their urges to control them.
However, not everyone that drinks is a drunk, just as not everyone who drives speeds.
We recently finished a major project. The team was from multiple states. We met for dinner after the final sign off was done. My friends all drink. After dinner they started sampling various craft beers. Then, they started custom ordering speciality drinks. The only one I “recognized” was a White Russian. And by recognized, I mean I can remember the name and have no idea what’s in it.
After dinner, we all went our separate ways.
Did they drink too much? I have no idea. I know they drank more than I did. And to my completely unprofessional view, they weren’t impaired.
The point of the evening was that alcohol is part of the culture of IT. We once had a late night strategy session one time with the division president, senior VPs and various members of the project team. We had an important client presentation the following day. About half way through our evening one of the senior VPs handed me an unopened beer. It only seemed natural to him.
To be successful in my position, I have to be comfortable around alcohol. Fortunately, I am. I know some former coworkers who would not be.
For you, it might be something else. The thing about business is that your comfort zone and someone elses very likely might not line up exactly. You have to be willing to either become comfortable, or find a new position.
Hopefully, you had a grandmother who liked bars. I know it helped me.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Seneca. . .why do you think we have a winner?
What do you mean?
I mean, why do we have a winner? I mean, if we just wanted to intimidate the districts, why not round up twenty-four of them at random and execute them all at once? Be a lot faster. . .Hope.
Hope?
Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.
Hope isn’t something you normally consider when talking about business principles. But, it’s a cruicial element of all aspects of business.
You hope your business does well. You hope you get the promotion. You hope you don’t get fired. Everything revolves around hope.
As a manager, you have to understand hope. People join a company for the benefits. They always leave for the same reason; management.
So, as a manager, your goal is to figure out how to keep your employees from wanting to go work for someone else. The easiest way?
Hope.
And let’s be clear, I don’t mean false hope. I don’t mean throwing carrots at a starving mule and hoping that will make a difference. Of course, you have to make work a place where people feel their work is important and where they feel valued. But, you also have to give them hope.
As President Snow said, even a little hope is effective. A lot has been written about managers vs leaders. (Some of it written by me. (Manager vs Leaders Cage Match.)
One of the roles of managers and leaders is to provide a vision for their teams. Even if you are line manager, you can inspire hope.
What gets measured improves.
Every team has some measure of success. I work in the call center industry. Our front line teams have metrics like customer satisfaction, technical accuracy, first call closure and similar call center metrics. The most effective front line managers are those who work to inspire their team.
We are going to set the top achievement for customer satisfaction this month! And here’s the plan that will get us there!
And while President Snow worried that too much hope might cause an explosion, that’s exactly the reaction you want.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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My son played a football game today. It was a pretty good game. Or so I heard. My view was somewhat obstructed.
It was a JV game for the Pleasant Grove High School Vikings against Westlake. I’m not sure what the mascot for Westlake is. In fact, the only thing I know is that it literally is on the West side of Utah Lake.
I arrived at the stadium a few minutes after kickoff. As I walked in, PG ran a play from their own 40 yard line. It was a pass to the tight end running a crossing pattern. He caught it perfectly in stride, beat the defense to the corner, turned upfield and ran it in for a touchdown. As he made his way back to the sidelines, I recognized the number for my good friend’s son. It was only the second touchdown he had scored and the first one that was on purpose.
My friend and his wife entered the stadium five minutes later. He missed it.
My son plays defense. He doesn’t score touchdowns. He stops them. And he had a really good game, making some key tackles. I got to see a few.
See, the game started at 3:30. I took my phone with me to the game. Because I always take my phone with me. . .to the game, to the movies. Just in case there is an outage call.
There was an outage call.
My smartphone means that I can join an outage call. . .and on the second line call the client. . .and of course, read the emails. And I can still watch the game. That’s why there’s a mute button on my headset.
Unfortunately there is also a storm moving into Utah. The temperature at game time was about 50 degrees with lots of wind. And that wind was playing havoc with my mic. It wasn’t the chilling wind that drove me back to my car. It was the constant requests of
Could you say that again? There’s a lot of background noise.
So, with 8 minutes left in the second quarter I retreated to the view from the parking lot. The outage lasted about an hour. I got to return to the game for the fourth quarter.
People often ask me about my work life balance. Mostly they ask because they don’t think I have one. They’re wrong. My work life balance is what allows me to attend my son’s JV football game at 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. It also requires me to miss the middle part of the game. Is that too high a price to pay to get to see my son play football on a Wednesday afternoon?
Nope. It just changes my seating options.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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My son plays cornerback for his high school football team. Last year was his first year playing. Last year he made the Sophomore team and got to dress for the JV games. This year he’s on the JV team and he gets to dress for the Varsity games.
Cornerback is considered a skill position. Basically the cornerback lines up on the defensive side of the ball near the sidelines and goes up against the offensive wide receivers. Wide receivers are generally the fastest players on the offensive. At the snap of the ball they explode off the line and run a predefined route that they hope will put them in a position to catch the ball.
The cornerbacks have to cover those wide receivers. Where the wide receiver is running forward, the cornerback starts off running backward. Where the wide reciever runs a predefined route, the cornerback has to attempt to keep up with him while not knowing which direction he’s going to turn.
Cornerbacks are typically the fastest runners on the defensive. It takes a lot of effort to match the speedy wide recievers.
My son wants to play varsity. . .or maybe quit. He loves football, but he’s frustrated that he doesn’t get to play more. He’s literally the fastest runner on the team. But, he just hasn’t played enough.
He approaches football in a way that I wish he approached his schoolwork. He watches film. He watches his own plays on tape. He works out in the weight room. He attends every practice.
Steve Martin, the actor, comedian and now banjo player was not a naturally funny person. He just worked incredibly hard at it. His personal motto was
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
– Steve Martin
It’s the advice I gave my son. He wants to play in the NFL. He’s a little small for a high school player, at 5’9″. But, there are certainly shorter NFL players. I don’t attempt to discourage him. The odds of him ever taking a snap in the NFL are really poor. But, I figure that everyone playing in the NFL currently was once a 16 year old high school player with dreams of playing in the NFL.
My son can’t do much about his height, but the rest of his preparation is up to him. I explained that if he’s good enough, it doesn’t matter if the coaches like him or not. He’ll play. Since the defensive coordinator is literally our next door neighbor, I’m pretty sure that it’s not an issue with him being an unknown.
My son may or may not ever get to play in college or the NFL, but what he absolutely can do is become the best football player he can become.
Our own jobs are like that. Just as a football coach is interested in winning games, and will play the best players in trying to achieve that goal, your company wants to be successful. Whether you are a programmer, marketer, program manager, or janitor, the best advice is “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It’s a familiar meme. A beautiful cabin, or a wonderful island, or some other “off grid” location. You can live there for a year, but on one condition. You have to give up your electronics.
Apparently there is some difficulty for some people.
I don’t understand those people.
I understand technology. I’ve been working with it since about 1980 when I wrote my first program and stored it on a cassette tape. Since then, I’ve written code, tested code, written documentation on programs, written and delivered training about programs. I’ve worked for Microsoft, WordPerfect, Novell, and numerous small software companies.
I’ve had a cell phone for nearly as long as cell phones have been a thing. I had one of those brick phones. It was the “on-call” phone. I don’t even remember which company it was for. Today, I have an on-call phone. It’s the same as my cell phone. It is my cell phone. I don’t even bother with a desk phone. It just forwards to my cell phone.
My phone goes everywhere with me. Literally everywhere. It goes with me on vacation. It goes with me to the movies. I attended a high school choir concert tonight. I took my phone. I’ve forgetting my laptop at home and didn’t go back for it. I once got nearly all the way to work, a 40 mile trip and realized I had forgot my phone. I went home to get it.
I live with my phone.
I wish I didn’t.
In fact, at times even when my lovely wife calls, the fact that it’s my phone ringing sets me slightly on edge. (I get over it once I see it’s her.) But, the idea of being tied to my phone is not a pleasant thought.
Don’t misunderstand, I use my phone as much as the next person. I have the MLB app on my phone. I use my phone to surf the web. I have google maps. The only thing I don’t have is games. I spend enough time on my phone, I don’t really need to use it for entertainment.
And given the choice, I’d drop it in the lake.
There are things I’d miss, sure. But, there’s plenty more I wouldn’t. And given a nice cabin in the woods? That would hardly be a hardship.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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You will need to upgrade all your cj90 adapters from version 1.2.7 to 1.3.0.
Isn’t the most current version 1.3.1?
Yes, but you can’t upgrade to that one. It doesn’t work.
Our client has some pretty stringent software requirements. Because we are using a virtual emulator to attach to their network, the software we run on our computers must be compatible with their existing tools. It’s a very collaborative process. We talk a lot and test often.
And their latest testing was that when we went from Windows 7 to Windows 10 we would need to upgrade the software on the cj90 communication devices. Technically, since a cj90 is a piece of hardware, we are not upgrading software, we are upgrading firmware. The two are very similar.
The process of upgrading is pretty simple. You attach the cj90 to a USB port on a computer. You load the management tool on the computer and use it to check for updates. If there are updates available, in other words, you current firmware version is out of date, you click a button and it downloads and installs the new firmware.
Easy peasy lemon squeezee, right?
Not quite.
The upgrade tool doesn’t let you specify a version to upgrade to. You just get upgraded to the latest version. We tried the cj90 upgrade on a few stations in our training room, to test. The cj90 worked perfectly under Windows 10. But, we didn’t need it to work perfectly, we needed it to break in a specific manner to prevent anyone from hanging up a phone call from the cj90 device. Instead we wanted our agents to use the software interface on their own computers when it was time to disconnect a call.
As I upgraded the first cj90 I noticed that the version went from 1.2.7 to 1.3.1. I didn’t have the option of choosing a previous version.
We had tested the 1.3.1 software and when we attempted to modify the file structure to prevent accidental hang ups, the entire phone froze up. It no longer broke in the way the previous versions had. In the way we expected and wanted it to.
Adam, the client engineer who was with us shook his head,
I know what they are going to say. They are going to tell me to work with the cj90 manufacture to “fix” the issue.
But, it’s not broken. In fact the problem is that it won’t break the way we need it to.
Typically, that’s not something a manufacture will put a high priority on fixing.
In the mean time, we left everything on 1.2.7. and we didn’t break it. After all, if breaking it isn’t going to help, you might as well take care of it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I evaluated the poor life decisions that had led me to this point in my life. I stood in my garage last Saturday morning. How had I gotten here? And more importantly, how could I get out of here? I wasn’t have some existential crisis. I was having a true crisis.
I say I was “standing” in my garage. This is true. It is also true that I was somewhat pecariously balanced on a sawhorse that was holding up one end of a board I used as a work bench. My crisis was that I needed to get down. My problem was that I was being held captive by my garage door. My fingers were crushed between the door and wall and I couldn’t get them out. I was trapped and I was hurting and it was my own stupid fault.
Recently I installed weatherstripping around my garage door. Utah winters are cold enough and the gaps around my door let too much of the outside to the inside. Installing the weatherstripping is a pretty straightforward operation. You basically nail a long strip of rubberized silcone to the wall around your garage door.
Unfortunately, as it moved up and down, the door had pulled the stipping off the nails and a three foot length of it hung down in front of my door. It was only going to get worse if I left it. So, Saturday, I decided to do a little repair work.
My problem was the dangling I diweatherstripping was outside the door and I needed to be inside the door to f ix it. First I opened the door. The weatherstripping was attached about 8′ above the ground. If I put the ladder in place, I wouldn’t be able to close the door without moving the table. So, rather than stand secure on the ladder, I carefully clambered up on my “table.” I reached out to the garage door tracks to steady myself.
Next, I grabbed the dangling bit of weatherstripping and lifted it up to the level I needed to reattach it above the open garage door. There was not room with the door open to reattach the stripping. I was going to need to hold it so that it didn’t fall back down while the door was closing. I carefully reached around the backside of the garage track and pressed the weatherstripping securely against the wall.
Next, I very carefully reached down and pressed the Door Close button on the exterior keypad. Immediately I felt the taut steel cable that holds the door up start to rub against my hand. I quickly jabbed at the Door Close button again to make the door stop and return to the full open position.
Whew! That was close and could have been a disaster. At this point I perhaps should have considered my options and rethought my stupid repair strategy. Oh, I thought I made a smart readjustment. I moved my hand higher on the wall in a wide open spot that was a long ways away from the dangerous cable.
Prepared to give it another go, I reached down and pressed the Door Close again. The door started to close and I was happy to see and feel that I was nowhere near any of the moving parts. A garage door may not feel like it, but it’s incredibly heavy. The typical garage door opener is a half horsepower. That’s powerful. It has to be to lift a steel door that measures 8′ high by 16′ long. That motor was slowly lowering that massive door and my fingers were well out of the way. In fact, My fingers were almost exactly in line with where the weatherstripping would need to end up.
Perhaps it’s good to know two things about the spot where the door meets the weatherstripping. First, the the top of the garage door exactly meets the edge of the weatherstripping. Second and infinitely more important in my current situation is the top of the garage door is about 2″ wider than the rest of the door.
That 2″ is noteworthy. At least it is to me. As the door settled against the cement floor, the top of the door came down and sealed itself against the wall. Unfortunately my fingers were already in that space. The door came down on the top of my first two fingers and I immediately realized, “I’m in trouble.”
And that led me to my moment of reflection. I’ve never been the type to panic, and I didn’t now. My fingers did not appear to be bleeding, but I couldn’t yet tell if they were broken. Oh, they were hurt. They definitely were painful.
My first thought was to open the door. But, the keypad that was so easily accesible when the door was open might as well have been locked behind a vault door. My next thought was to pull the door away from the wall enough to free my fingers. Try as I might, I couldn’t budge the door.
My position balanced on the sawhorse was only mildly stable. Not really in a position to get a lot of leverage. I tcouldcried not to contemplate what would happen to my hand if I slipped off my perch.
If I couldn’t pull my hand free, my next thought was to use a tool. Fortunately I had brought a hammer with me to help nail in the weatherstripping. Unfortunately, it was sitting at my feet on the workbench. It was only about a twelve inches out of reach, but it might as well have been 12 feet. I tried to slip my foot under the handle. Maybe I could flip it up. And maybe I might push it right off the table, which is what I was in danger of doing.
My family were all busy sleeping in on a Saturday morning. And the garage is at the opposite end of the house from the bedrooms. Still, it was worth a shot,
HELP!!! Can anyone hear me?!? HELPPPPP!
I knew it was a useless gesture, but desparate times and all that. I couldn’t get down. I couldn’t open the door and I couldn’t reach my hammer. What could I reach? I looked around the workbench. The end of the workbench had a vise bolted to it. And hanging on the vise was a three foot wire bent into the shape of a horse shoe. I edged my foot over and managed to lift the edge of the wire high enough to grab it with my free right hand.
My left hand was starting to throb a little. I pushed that out of my mind as I reversed the wire so that I was holding one “leg” of the wire and the loop was facing down. I now carefully (yeah, I used that word a lot along with prayers to God to please help me) carefully, I looped the bottom of the wire over the end of the hammer and ever so slowly lifted it up. When the handle was nearly verticle, I slid my leg over to keep it upright. Dropping the wire, I could now reach the upended handle of the hammer.
I took a deep breath and tried to push the pain out of my mind. While whispering another prayer, I positioned the hammer so that the claw edge was under the edge of the door. Now, I could use the sawhorse to my benefit. I pushed up on the hammer. The door refused to budge. Setting myself again, I shoved up even harder. I felt a slight lessoning of pressure on my aching fingers.
Giving it one more solid push, finally, I scraped my fingers out from under the edge of the door.
In mild disbelief I stared at the scraped across the back of my fingers. No blood, and flexing my fingers a few times I satisfied myself that they were in fact, not broken. I uttered another silent prayer for safe deliverance.
As I started to climb down, I realized I still had the hammer in my hand. . .I mean, I’m already up here. . .
The weatherstripping, of course, had fallen back down in front of the door. But, I silently cursed myself as I pulled easily pulled it up from the inside. Yes, I really had nearly broken my fingers “fixing” a non-existant problem.
I easily pulled out the nails that the weatherstripping had pulled off from. I quickly tacked the strip back in place and got down off my makeshift ladder.
A day later, the scrapes on my hand hardly matched the seriousness of how I’d gotten them.
It could have turned out so much differently. What do they say, “God loves home repairmen and fools”? I pretty sure it was something like that.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I was trying to do two things at once, hold a meeting and conduct a client audit. Everyone else was doing two (or more) things at the same time too. My Lead Desktop engineer was literally everywhere. Client audits can be stressful. There are about a hundred different things they check. And it seems like 95 of those things need a desktop engineer to verify them.
He had worked 24 hours out of the past 36. He was part of our team as we made our way around the site. The worst part of our preparation for the audit was that we hadn’t managed to get all of our computers built. We might pass the audit, but I still had to get the computers built. The issue was there had been problems with the build. We’d worked on it, mostly the desktop engineers, but all of us.
I decided it was time to escalate and get some more help. I sent a couple of quick emails just before the audit started. They went to the senior IT leadership.
And then I went off to work through the audit. . .along with my desktop engineer. . .because I needed him.
The audit went well. We took the auditors all over the sprawling site. We looked at generators. We looked at camera coverage, and we looked at a lot of computers.
And somewhere someone was reading my email from earlier. And that someone called another someone to ask why the site wasn’t set up yet. And that second someone called another someone and told them that the site would need to be done by the end of the day, no matter what. And that someone called his guy to tell him to “Get it fixed! Right now
Rodney, I need to drop from the tour. I’ve been given a very high priority task.
Okay. What is it.
I’ve been told that I must have the computers setup by today, no matter what.
Well,go do what you need to do. We’ll be fine.
And that’s how I coopted and ended up stealing my own resource.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
Okay, it wasn’t an actual drug deal, but it sure felt like it.
Yesterday was a memorable day. After six months and 162 games played by 30 different teams, the 2019 baseball regular season came to an end. It’s said that every team except the champion ends in a loss. That’s not true. In fact, the Mariners, who had a terrible season at 68 wins and 94 losses, actually won their last game of the season 3-1 over the Oakland A’s. The Mariners are done with their season and the A’s are headed to the playoffs.
Ten teams made the playoffs, five from the National League and five from the American League. In addition to the A’s, the three division champions from the American league advanced; the Astros, the Twins, and the Yankees. The other wildcard team is the Tampa Bay Rays. From the National League, the trhee division champions are the Braves, the Cardinals and the Dodgers. The Wildcard teams are the Brewers and the Washington Nationals.
The Nationals and the Brewers played today. The Nationals beat the Brewers in a thrilling come from behind victory in Washington DC. I’m secretly rooting for the Nationals. Well, not so secretly. I want to see the Nationals win for three reasons.
First, their are two teams in all of Major League baseball that have never been to the World Series. My beleaguered Seattle Mariners and the Washington Nationals. Before the Nationals there was another MLB team in DC, the Washington Senators. The Senators went to the Series and 1924. In 1960 they left DC to become the Atlanta Braves.
So, if the Nationals go to the Series, Seattle will be the lone king of Futility Hill. Not that I don’t want to see Seattle make it to the championship, but if they are going to be hapless losers, I at least want them to be exclusive hapless losers.
The second reason I want to Nationals to enjoy a long playoff run is completely selfish. I might end up in Virginia in a couple of weeks. I’ve never seen the Nationals stadium. I’d like a chance to see a game there. My bucket list only has a single item left on it. I want to see a game in every major league baseball park. So far, I’ve se 12 of the 30. Nationals would be one more off the list.
The tickets will be hugely expensive, and I might have to scalp them, but, I at least want the option.
I’ve attended games before on a scalped ticket. The worst experience was at a Red Sox game. They were playing the Yankees and it was the last series of the year. It’s technically illegal to scalp Red Sox tickets. But, that just means you have to be careful to not get caught. The consierge at the hotel told me to walk to a particular spot out in front the stadium and someone would approach me. I then had to go to a pizza place on the corner and go into the men’s room. I had about a 30 second window when a man would come in and offer me a ticket. I had to have my money ready because he would only stay in the bathroom a few seconds.
It really did feel like a drug deal. And for $40 I got a $20 seat in the lower bowl to watch the Red Sox attempt to take down the Yankees.
You see, there is a third reason I want the Nationals to win. But, it’s the same reason I want every other team currently in the playoffs to lead. Every team except one. Because, as I’ve said, the Mariners are my favorite team. But, I actually have two favorite teams: The Mariners. . .and anyone who plays the Yankees.
Let the playoffs begin!
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved