Domestic Geek

I don't know if I've written this before, but Marcus and I work at a 24/7 print house. It's staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we're almost always busy, especially at the end of the month.

Well, while Marcus was out mountain biking today, he started getting calls on his work phone and emails forwarded to his personal phone. I knew something must be up. Sure enough, the power went out at 1:30ish and all of the company's servers and presses went down hard. We got there about 4:30 and there was still no power. After about 15 minutes, though, the power was finally restored and Marcus set about restarting the massive amounts of servers while I took care of restarting my DVD archiving in prepress. It took over an hour to get everything back up and running. That sucks because I didn't eat lunch and was really hoping to go get an early dinner.

Well, about a half hour ago Marcus got a call that power was out again. They're going to call him when it comes back on, but he'll have to drive out there and do it all over again. Thankfully, my archiving should've been completed by that time as there was only six more discs to burn.

What slays me is that, with as critical as it is to keep the presses running at all times, we have very little backup power. We have a big power supply that keeps a key piece of equipment running long enough to finish what it's doing. The main servers have batteries that will keep them going for 20-30 minutes so that they can be shut down properly. Not useful when Marcus lives so far away and he's not called until power has already been out over 15 minutes.

When all is said and done, the plant is going to have lost almost an entire shift worth of productivity today, even though they have to pay everyone that sat there in the dark. That's huge.

UPDATE: Someone just called and told Marcus that the power is not supposed to be back on until at least 1:30 am. At least this fiasco won't interfere with his Saturday night gaming.

Wow, big news at work today and I'm not sure if it is good or bad. The guy who is our prepress department technical guy (who has been more or less mentoring me) gave his two weeks notice. I knew he had been interviewing with another company, but since it had been awhile since he had heard anything from them, I figured they went with someone else. The last week or so, he's been teaching me lots of tech and server stuff and I remarked to Marcus that it was almost as if he was preparing to leave. On Monday, he started sorting through his stuff and began taking his personal books and stuff home. Well, today he got his offer phone call and he gave his notice. What sucks is that the girl they hired to be his backup (I think she started a couple of weeks after I) is totally unqualified for his position. I mean, she knows how to be a prepress operator and is a trained designer, but as far as filling this guy's shoes, she just doesn't have it. What's going to suck is we are coming up on our busy period right before the holidays. Not really the best time to be in this boat. Oh, well. We'll just have to take it one day at a time and muddle through. It's going to be interesting.

It's starting to feel like fall in the morning. I love it when there is just a tiny cool nip in the air.

After the super busy last two weeks at work where the supervisor realized I could've been more help had I been trained to be an operator already, I finally started learning how to do that yesterday. Wow, there is so much to do to get customer files ready to print. If one doesn't already exist, I'm seriously considering starting a blog to provide tips to designers to make better files. When I first when to a DMG meeting, I couldn't understand why designers and prepress people hated each other so...now I get it. The majority of the fault lies with designers who don't really understand the printing process or how to provide usable files. Just because you can kind of get around a page layout program doesn't make one a good designer. Just sayin'.

Vegas is looking less and less like a reality. I'll wait a couple of weeks to rescind my vacation request at work, but I don't have the money to go and don't see getting it in time either. I also decided that I'm really going to get serious and get the embroidery business I want up and running in the new year (I really want my own business and don't want to be working where I am in 5–10 years). Going to a blogging conference when I'm sick of blogging just isn't making sense. While I'd love to see the gals I've met online there, it's not enough of a motivating factor when I have a goal I want and need to achieve. I still want to go to Vegas, but I want to make sure I have the funds available to do all that I want to do there (i.e. a Blue Man show, a Cirque show, etc.) I also really want to go with Marcus, so that means driving and even more time off from work. I may make plans to go spring or something when I actually get paid vacation time from work.

OK, even though I took a 3 hour nap when I got home from work, I'm tired and have to get up for work in five hours, so I'd better head off to bed.

This really has been the longest work week ever. It shouldn't because we're really busy, but having the Friday supervisor there everyday makes every day seem like Friday, yet Friday never comes. I also agreed to work overtime this weekend to get extra cash. If we would stay busy enough between now and my Vegas trip that I could get OT every week, I'll make it.

We lucked out last night, though. The Friday supervisor lives two streets away from us in the same park. The transformer that supplies electricity to her street blew and they were in the dark for over six hours until crews could replace it. Of course, I had no clue this happened until she asked me how I liked the heat last night. I was totally confused by her question and she thought we were in the dark, too. Six hours without my Internet connection? Don't think I could bear it!

I try not to complain about work much anymore because compared to other jobs, there's really not a whole lot to complain about. Unfortunately, there is one big problem. I hate it when my supervisor goes on vacation. The person who covers for him is the Friday – Sunday supervisor and when she's there on Monday, it feels like Friday and that makes for one hell of a long week.