Day 449: "Smart"
Jun. 7th, 2021 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeOur local electric utility is installing "smart" readers. They'd promised to call each household ahead of time and also to knock on people's doors, but when I woke today, my desktop computer was dead. It turns out they did our installation today - they'd knocked on our door before I was awake (it woke D. up but he stayed in bed), and we never got a call, nor did J. Apparently the process was too much for my computer, so, zap.
I emailed the office in a panic, since I have this proposal to write, and since it's a company machine. The IT guy in the office today said he could send me home with a loaner laptop, which would give me access to MS Office, since I don't want to spend $100+ to put it on my own laptop. So I loaded the desktop machine up and off I went. They'd rented out so much of our office space that our IT department is now only accessible by stairs, not the elevator! That was pretty tiresome, lugging the laptop up to the third floor.
So I left it with him and got a loaner laptop, then went back to my own office, stopping along the way to visit with EW, who's also working on the proposal with me, and whom I haven't seen in real life for well over a year. I also printed a couple of papers, updated some files, and copied a bunch of pages from that Indigenous People's History book. And then, when I returned from the copy room, there was the IT guy! My theory had been correct; it was the power supply, and swapping in a different one fixed it. I'd procrastinated leaving the office long enough that I don't have to make a second office trip this week.
This "smart" reader installation isn't the greatest. Someone EW knows lost their entire computer to it, and a retired coworker's wife told me on Facebook that they know someone who lost their air conditioning to it. Then another friend said he learned the hard way that the utilities are apparently exempt from liability for their mistakes. I'm so glad that for me, it was just the power supply.
I emailed the office in a panic, since I have this proposal to write, and since it's a company machine. The IT guy in the office today said he could send me home with a loaner laptop, which would give me access to MS Office, since I don't want to spend $100+ to put it on my own laptop. So I loaded the desktop machine up and off I went. They'd rented out so much of our office space that our IT department is now only accessible by stairs, not the elevator! That was pretty tiresome, lugging the laptop up to the third floor.
So I left it with him and got a loaner laptop, then went back to my own office, stopping along the way to visit with EW, who's also working on the proposal with me, and whom I haven't seen in real life for well over a year. I also printed a couple of papers, updated some files, and copied a bunch of pages from that Indigenous People's History book. And then, when I returned from the copy room, there was the IT guy! My theory had been correct; it was the power supply, and swapping in a different one fixed it. I'd procrastinated leaving the office long enough that I don't have to make a second office trip this week.
This "smart" reader installation isn't the greatest. Someone EW knows lost their entire computer to it, and a retired coworker's wife told me on Facebook that they know someone who lost their air conditioning to it. Then another friend said he learned the hard way that the utilities are apparently exempt from liability for their mistakes. I'm so glad that for me, it was just the power supply.