Backing track: flor - Slow Motion
It's still dark outside when I roll over on Thursday morning and check my phone to find out it's 4:17AM. I've been asleep for three and a half hours, and I don't need to be up for at least two more, so after a quick bladder-drain I roll back into the unfamiliar bed I just woke up in to see if I can find them. Just like my cat in similar situations they seem to have slipped into the gloom with no intention of being found, but a short while later I hear my mother going about her morning routine in the kitchen, so I get up to say hello. Ricky picked me up from the airport when I landed just before Mother Dear's bedtime last night, so she was asleep and the house still when I crept in silently and sent myself to bed after a late dinner at Alfred's Kitchen. My maternal obligation discharged, she takes herself off to the "food rescue" charity where she volunteers a couple of times a week, and I shake myself to the shower to sluice off the film of fatigue I brought back from dreamland, pull on my corporate uniform, and sit down with my laptop and a coffee to prep for the day.
I've a full schedule ahead of me; Andrew the Shipwright booked at least the first half of my day the moment he knew I'd be in town, and there's easily three more hours I need to spend at Marine#2. I check my email, and the tracking on the hardware shipment which I need to arrive in Mandurah by Monday to find it's expected today, so Marine#4 receive an "everything's falling into place" email to read over their tea and toast. Correspondence clear, I stow my laptop alongside the backup I carry everywhere when I'm on a work trip, check that my tools are in their relevant pockets, shoulder my backpack, push flor through my earphones, and hit the street. Mother Dear needs her car today, and Bibra Lake is not what you'd call "easily accessible from here" by public transport, so the company credit card will be taking a couple of Uber-sized hits today. That coffee barely scratched the surface of my sleep deprivation and I'm going to need caffeine today like a bee-sting victim needs epinephrine because caffeine is life, so I head towards the nearby servo. I could get the Uber-driver to stop enroute, but it's barely 6:31AM and there's no point arriving much before 8:00AM, so I might as well walk.
The air has a cool crispness as I hi-ho, hi-ho my way north through Lathlain, and we both seem oddly cheerful. By the time I walk through the doors of the BP on Archer St I've received an affable nod from the lantern-jawed jogger with a distinctly military bearing I pass on Goddard St, a smile from the middle-aged anglo lady walking a pair of excitable pitbulls on Custance St when I go wide to stay outside their leash-radius, which is almost as embarrassed as the grinning indigenous driver's teeth are white when he waves me past after I go to give way to him just before Roberts Rd.
By 7:47AM I'm climbing out of a Mazda CX-50 after a pleasant chat with my Nepalese driver and a smooth run down Leach Hwy just in time to catch Andrew the Shipwright pulling up on his pushbike. I reach into my backpack, crack open the first of my cache of glistening energy drinks, follow him inside, and get to work.
First order of business is a restructure of Marine#1's Sharepoint Document Library. I've been gently nagging them for months to separate the more sensitive documents out of the "all access" library and into the Management Team location I set up with more appropriate RBAC's, and it's finally become a priority to them. A week ago I received an email from Andrew at 6:56PM his time, and I called him straight away.
"You need this looked at now, or tee'ing it up for when I'm in town next week?"
"God no. What is it, 9 o'clock over there? Just getting it on your radar."
"10. Daylight Savings kicked in on the weekend."
"Fucking hell, you're worse than I am..."
I checked the Dynamic Groups and metadata filters before I flew out, so all it takes is triggering a Sync on Andrew the Shipwright's desktop, and showing him how to do a back-end Move in his browser. I'll set up an auto-sync Policy in Intune in a few days once I'm sure he's not going to rearrange again, but I like to run checks and maintenance on the PC fleet by hand every once in a while because it gives me the opportunity to check in with the staff, so I go desk-to-desk. I find that a lot of feedback and niggles they wouldn't ordinarily think to mention fall out when I take over their machine to give it a shake-down and get them chatting. It might sound inefficient for a half-hour task to take two, but in that time I've sorted out an audio driver problem, found a misconfiguration causing people's Word and Excel to save in ODF instead of the standard XML format, fixed the Bookkeeper's printer connection and shown her how to cache her Remote Access login, cut the Service Manager over from Remote Desktop to the more streamlined RemoteApp experience, and discovered two more members of the Management Team than we'd thought there were at 8:26AM.
I cruise back to the Bossman's office and debrief him whilst I check over the old PC that used to run the camera control software for his timelapse solution, declare that 12 years is long enough to keep a Lenovo SFF with 8GB of RAM and a 2nd Gen Intel Core i5 CPU in service, and strip the hard disk out for separate disposal to the rest of the machine. I prefer Dell equipment for their warranty, build-quality, and overall value, but I'll be the first to agree that Lenovo build their kit as robust as Russians build assault rifles. This was a good use for a machine that had got too slow for production work, and while a Raspberry Pi could have done it just as well he didn't have one of those lying around. It's spent at least the last 6 years of its longer-than-average service life connected to a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, the pair to which was plugged into an old Canon EOS 1300D DSLR he'd mounted to a bracket overlooking the workshop which pumps out 25 twin-engine catamarans a year. The software running on the PC triggered the camera to take a photo twice a day, 5 days a week, saving it into a folder sync'd to its own Sharepoint Library that he shares with clients so they can watch their half-million dollar boats being built in real-time. At the end of the build those photos get rolled into a minute-long video, burned to a DVD with the stills, the media archived, and the process starts all over again. When I was here back in June I put my head together with the guys who manage Marine#1's security system, and set up a PoC using one of those cameras instead. There are a lot of benefits to using a security camera for this; weatherproofing copes with the the paint, resin, and solvent fumes much better than the delicate seals in a DSLR, and the polymer dust from sanding back the hull gets into everything. The workshop has a set of industrial-strength extraction fans at the rear, and they've sealed every gap with caulk to keep the entire two-story space at negative-pressure, preventing it from becoming a toxic OHS nightmare. The door to the break-room is chocked open so they can come and go, and the constant breeze flowing through it keeps dust from getting into everyone's toasties. Andrew's a remarkably clever guy, and it shows in situations like this. Even so, that old Canon was caked with white dust, and the lens constantly needed cleaning. It also needed separate power, plus the software was flakier than a fish & chip shop's specials and needed a regular kick to keep running. Security cameras are designed to take a pounding, and with PoE they only need one cable to run. A couple of months ago the security guys fitted a Pan-Tilt-Zoom model, and I wrote a script to make it point to different parts of the workshop in sequence, capturing a still at each, so now there are five timelapse sets being generated each day rather than one. It's been running without a hitch ever since, the DSLR is sitting on a shelf behind the infamous laser-cutter, and the time has finally come for the old Lenovo to go to its ultimate reward in Silicon Heaven where all the calculators go, and the iron shall lie down with the lamp.
The SFF chassis becomes a riser for the App Server to get it off the floor, and I hand the mechanical 500GB SATA drive over to the Field Mechanics so they can give it a viking funeral.
I'm rolling the cables up to throw in the spares cupboard at 11:34AM when Andrew the Shipwright's new iPhone 16 Pro lands on the desk I'm sitting under along with his old 14; he needed a handset for a new hire, but why should the FNG get the new hotness when the Bossman's still sporting a two-generation old model? The automated Intune deployment I built a while back didn't quite accommodate some of his customisations, and he was getting a login loop in Authenticator. I'd finished wiping, reprovisioning, and reconfig'ing the 14 by the time I worked out Authenticator on the 16 Pro was trying to retrieve the now-deleted auth token from the 14, and I need to hop into his Entra account to remove the surplus Authentication Method; I'm a little ashamed with myself for how long it took to work out, but by this point I've been on the job longer than I slept last night and it hadn't quite ticked over midday.
I've handed the Bossman his phone back and set the new mechanic's one on the charge when my own phone rings, so I step out for a break and have a chat with the pimp I've been dealing with lately. I put in an application for a chunky-looking role a few weeks ago; one of the larger federal departments looking for an ITSM Transformation Manager to review and rebuild their IT Service Delivery structure and practice from the inside-out. She tells me they'd pulled it from BuyICT, which is why I've not heard anything since, and have just put it back up again with small changes to the requirements. The response I wrote up previously is still applicable so at least won't need a redo, but she suggests we shave $5/hour off my original asking rate before resubmitting to keep things competitive. That's still $15/hour more than the base-rate I quote for gig-work, and this is a multi-year full-time contract, so I rubber-stamp it and kept moving.
On the way back up I stop by the comm's rack to pull the hard drive out of the Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE; I'd run a parallel PoC for the timelapse solution using an old Unifi Protect camera I had lying around, but as nice as the apps and management options are it's not a use-case which Unifi developed it for, so it hadn't been effective. I'd disabled the service and purged the drive earlier in the morning and prefer not to leave loose-ends, so I pull my screwdriver out to gank the 500GB SSD for re-use elsewhere. While I'm pottering around in the rack tidying up a few errant cables and checking the stock of spares I have stashed the mechanics are cruising through to grab their lunch, and I receive a steady stream of "how you doin' Pete?" and "heeeey, you're back!" as they go by. Spending a solid week and a half in and amongst them in June made me a familiar face, and they like me because the shit I build makes their lives a LOT easier, I always ask before borrowing tools, and put them back where I found them. Just as I'm finishing up Lukey comes by to ask for advice on recovering space on his home computer; it sounds like the main drive is full of old iTunes cache and backups, so I tell him how to move that all to the secondary disk, and make sure he has my email address in case that's not enough. He leaves with a grin, I close the rack back up, and head back upstairs at 12:29PM.
I've just sat down to check some emails, and I'm half-way through letting Marine#4 know that the delivery has arrived at the workshop next to theirs when The Fucking EFTPOS Tech finally shows his face. They've been out to install the new payment terminal twice already, for an hour or more each time, without managing to get their shit in one sock; I'd dealt with two different gormless muppets over the phone, and had to talk the Parts Manager through getting his desktop back up and running when the last one broke his network settings on his way out the door, knocking him offline. They called to schedule the third-time's-a-charm appointment the day after I'd let Andrew know I was coming, so he set it up for the day he knew I'd be paying him a visit. I've been waiting all day for this, oh yes, so I snap my laptop closed, leave it on the charge, put on my best devilish grin, and apparate downstairs in a puff of brimstone to play Deeply Scary Technomage.
I've just finished sending that email to Marine#4 at 1:07PM when Andrew steps back into his mezzanine office.
"Oh, there you are. I thought the EFTPOS guy was showing up?"
"Yep. Been, gone."
"That was quick. Took him an hour to give up last time. What went wrong?"
"Nothing. It's in. Working, sorted."
"..."
"Wanna guess how long it took?"
"... go on," he replied, a predatory grin touching the corner of his mouth.
"10 minutes."
"Nah, really? What'd you do!?"
"Got him to plug it in, install his software, and growled at him whenever he tried to change anything else. Worked first time."
"You gotta be kidding me..."
"Yeah, if they'd just done what they were told the first time you'd have had it up and running weeks ago. They have a bullshit SOP they're made to follow, but they're still a pack of fucking clowns.
"Oh, and I had to re-cable the damn thing afterwards. He left the power cord dangling right next to the network cable the Service Manager's doggo chewed on, so I bound it up with the rest. Pulled that out while I was at it," I say, pointing to the spool of frayed Cat-6 on the desk next to me.
"Well we all know you're good at cleaning up after clowns, but what a three-ring shitshow. Thank fuck you were here, hey? I knew you'd sort it out."
"Hey man, it's what I do..."
Backing track: The Presets - Promises
I still have a pile of odds and ends to do when I say my goodbyes and head over to Marine#2, but it's all mop-up and improvements I can do remotely so I load my backpack up and hit the road at 2:46PM. It's about a 15min walk, so decided to save $10 and take the opportunity to check in on Bridget who, with the 3 hour time difference now daylight savings has kicked in, should be home from work by now. It was forecast to hit 28 degrees in Perth today. Even with my hat on my nose picks up a rosy glow form the sun, and when I walk through the double-door into Marine#2's showroom at 3:02PM my feet and head are heavy with weariness, and I've worked up a sweat.
I took these guys on four and a half years ago now. I'd been engaged by Marine#1 six-or-12 months earlier to migrate them from the cut-down implementation of Microsoft 365 which Crazy Domains peddles to people who don't know any better over to the real deal, with all the bells and whistles. A while later when Luke and Chris were complaining to Andrew about Krusty The Clown, their current IT Support, he told them, or so I heard from Chris some time later, "there's this guy Pete... he'll confuse the shit out of you, but he's real' fucking good. He'll get you sorted out."
They sent me an email a couple of days later, I booked in a time to pay them a visit, and proceeded to spend most of the next year rebuilding their entire IT system from the ground up. Ever since I've come and gone like I'm one of team because for all intents and purposes I am, only on an at-call basis. It's been the same over at Marine#1, then Marine#3, and the way things are shaping up by the end of next week that will include Marine#4 as well. I've grown hugely fond of my salt-of-the-earth "boat folk" and their no-bullshit attitude. They just want their shit to work, aren't afraid to adjust if there's a better way to do things, and are happy to pay reasonably to make it happen. Over the years I've learned to flow in and around them like water, eroding the rough edges that used to get in their way.
I've barely walked through the door when I'm marching back out of it again with the key to their PO Box in my hand, because AusPost decided that near enough was good enough, and left the RAM I'd ordered for them there instead of taking it all the way to the end. The first time I walked in those doors whilst on the clock I spent an afternoon going over the kit they were working with to see just how bad it could be, and it was pretty fucking bad. Krusty The Clown had a seriously dated concept for setting up an effective user environment; the under-spec'd Intel NUC's he'd sold them might have been OK if the Remote Desktop he was hosting had been decently resourced, wasn't piped down a VPN, then squeezed through an internet connection which was the digital equivalent of two rusty cans and a wet piece of string. There were more bottlenecks in his setup than the recycling bin after an undergrad end-of-semester party. I sat Luke and Chris down and laid out a plan to get some decent hardware on their desks, their email and file-sharing shifted to Microsoft 365, and a streamlined version of their Application Server migrated to some hardware we'd host onsite, staged out over the following year to make it easier to budget. We ordered a mix of laptops and desktops, enough to replace half their fleet, but with the prices of hardware at the peak of covid more inflated than a party clown's trousers I ordered them with smaller batteries and less RAM than I would have liked with a view to upgrading them in a year or two when things were cheaper. It turned out to be a solid play because they've run just fine, for much longer than I'd expected, and what would have cost an extra $200/unit in 2020 wound up coming to just over $100 for all three in 2024.
Back in the showroom surrounded by Garmin sonars and Yamaha outboards, I go to fill up my water bottle only to find it's not in my backpack. I give Andrew a quick call and confirm that I have indeed left the stainless steel keepsake from my last ever dive trip on the desk I'd been using in his office. It's 3:38PM, I've at least two hours of work to do at Marine#2, and he's going the wrong way after he knocks off to drop past, so I'm going to have to come back another day. It's just a water bottle, but it's the only memento I took away from that trip that wasn't bad memories. I'm swearing at myself as I get on with popping the baseplates off and slotting the extra memory modules into the space I'd made sure would be ready to accept them when I designed these builds 50 months ago, clear the BIOS warning saying that the amount of memory has changed, run hardware checks, Disk Cleanup, driver and Windows updates, and hand them back to their users one-by-one. I've just started on the third-and-final when the Marine#1 Parts Manager comes through the door waving my Big Blue Dive Khao Lak flask overhead; Andrew wasn't going this way, but it turns out the Parts Manager was.
"Marine#1 will be getting some freebies on their next hardware order," I tell myself.
To the Parts Manager I say, "Thank you fucking legend!"
The last thing on my run-sheet is a meeting with Luke, but he's in full-steam sales-pitch with a couple of customers weighing up engine options for the custom cruiser they're having built down the road. I squeeze in a check of the air filters on the server and comm's rack, both of which are clean, then settle in checking over a PC nearby where I can listen in. I've never had the chance to watch the man work, and it's fascinating. People browsing trailer-boats and accessories are all about the lifestyle; the tradies and professionals know what they want, so they're in and out, if they bother coming in at all. The sales patter switches between power-to-displacement ratios, the best moorings off Rottnest, digital-vs-analog autopilot profiles, and what fish are biting this month, delivered with a smooth professionally-approachable tone. The only way that man could have been more in his element would have needed us to be a couple of nautical miles west of Port Coogee Marina with his face full of spray blowing off the afternoon swell. Sadly I have a VOIP system to sell him, so our feet need to stay dry.
He ushers his customers out the door at 5:00PM on the dot with the lure of freshly caught dhufish and maori wrasse dangling in front of them, and sits down to talk price and feature comparisons between the lacklustre system he's been receiving woeful support on and the locally-owned alternative I Partnered with a couple of years ago. Irritatingly, whilst the one he's got might be average, it's not SO BAD he can ignore the cost, and as feature-rich as my Partner's product is it's also 20% more expensive. It's a good conversation; I like being kept on my toes, although by 5:48PM I'm less "float like a butterfly" than "sink like an anchor". I plead exhaustion, a need to check bundling options, and promise to go haggle some more with the vendor. By 6:04PM I'm on the footpath out front helping lock up the gates whilst on the phone with my contact Enrico, who also happens to be their CEO. It's another 34min before I have a bundle to quote, clear my other missed calls, and finally hail an Uber to get me out of Bibra Lake where the light is fading and I'm increasingly being swarmed by flying ants.
I have a pleasant ride in the back of the Mitsubishi Outlander, and an equally pleasant chat with its driver on my way to Bull Creek where I've completely misremembered the number of Binky's house. I've been visiting her there on-and-off for over half my life, and it's been 25 years since I had to know it, which is coincidentally the number of minutes the ride lasts. I knock on her door to find it unlocked and ajar so I let myself in at 7:14PM, landing next to my backpack on the floor of her living room with matching thuds. I take a moment to switch gears, say hello to her folks, pick myself back up, and load up to head out for dinner.
We decide to go for steak, and both wind up getting the ribs special instead, but that's fine; it would be pretty boring if things always went according to plan.
It's 11:17PM when I climb out of Binky's Infiniti Q60 in front of Mother Dear's house and walk down the long driveway with my silhouette cast in its headlights. I have 9.5 billable hours' worth of notes to write up and invoice, 3 unread emails which hit my inbox during dinner, and 2 quotes to do- or re-up, but none of that is getting done tonight. I've no site-work booked for Friday, so those are all problems for Future-Pete. Tomorrow's work will be completely different from today's, just like today bore absolutely no resemblance to yesterday, which is exactly how I like it. When I tell people with regular jobs, who go to work each day and do the same thing again and again, about what I do for a living they look at me like I'm mad, but the Andrews, Lukes, and Enricos, the Petes, Occam's Canadian Amys, and Sandras, anyone who's picked their own ball up to see how far they can run, they get it:
When you love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life.
And if we didn't love what we do, we'd all go do something else.
Because we could do that if we wanted, but we don't so we do this instead.
The house is dark and still when I roll over to put my Kobo down and pick up my phone to set an alarm, and see it's 1:05AM. Friday has already started; the first problem to tackle today is going to be getting some sleep.
