Och Aye The N00b!
On Friday the IT higher-ups in my office asked if I would be willing to go to Dundee for a couple of days to set up a "remote depot", which is basically a temporary office with 2 PC's, 3 printers, a modem and a router. The overtime offered was pretty decent and I'd never done anything like this before, so I readily agreed.
Get to the office at 8 Monday morning (yes, bank holiday Monday), load 9 fairly heavy boxes into the company van, then one of the third line support guys, also called Paul, and I set off on the 8 hour drive north. We take the driving in 2 hour shifts, which was cool as I'd never driven a van before. I took to it fairly quickly and because it was all motorway, and sometime after 4 pm we arrive at the docks in Dundee.
Setting up the equipment went smoothly enough. There were a couple of small problems like a temperamental power block but nothing held us up for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Everything tested fine but the people we were setting it up for wouldn't be joining us until the next day. So Paul and I head to the Premier Inn that the company had put us up in to have dinner, de-stress and get a decent nights sleep. We had a room each and they were pretty sweet rooms. Double bed, couch, crap TV though. Although I did get to see an episode of QI and an episode of Have I Got News For You hosted by Brian Blessed.
We were told that our contact was supposed to be meeting us at 10 on Tuesday morning, but just after 9 we got a call saying that he wouldn't be able to meet us until 3 pm as that was the earliest flight from Stanstead he could get. Luckily, there was another guy closer by who could do the same tests, and he met us at the site some time after 11. Everything tested fine, butt here were 2 fairly major delays. 1, Paul spent about an hour trying to send a (completely unrelated) report back to the office through the fairly sketchy dial-up connection, and there was no paper to test the printers because they need some special kind of paper with the perforations down the sides (like those old dot-matrix printers you probably had at school). There was talk that we wouldn't be able to go home until the paper arrived, but that wasn't likely to happen until the Wednesday. Luckily, a couple of phone-calls later and we were homeward bound by around 1 pm.
All in all, it was a good trip. It may have cost me a day off (I was meant to be working the Tuesday anyway), but I'm getting overtime for both days and I learned how to drive a van. I had Stuart's MP3 player and my new copy of Advance Wars: Dark Conflict to keep me entertained, and we saw some pretty cool scenery while on the road (I was like "holy crap, mountains") which made me wish I brought my camera. I'm not back in the office until Saturday evening so I'll have plenty of time to recover, too.
Get to the office at 8 Monday morning (yes, bank holiday Monday), load 9 fairly heavy boxes into the company van, then one of the third line support guys, also called Paul, and I set off on the 8 hour drive north. We take the driving in 2 hour shifts, which was cool as I'd never driven a van before. I took to it fairly quickly and because it was all motorway, and sometime after 4 pm we arrive at the docks in Dundee.
Setting up the equipment went smoothly enough. There were a couple of small problems like a temperamental power block but nothing held us up for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Everything tested fine but the people we were setting it up for wouldn't be joining us until the next day. So Paul and I head to the Premier Inn that the company had put us up in to have dinner, de-stress and get a decent nights sleep. We had a room each and they were pretty sweet rooms. Double bed, couch, crap TV though. Although I did get to see an episode of QI and an episode of Have I Got News For You hosted by Brian Blessed.
We were told that our contact was supposed to be meeting us at 10 on Tuesday morning, but just after 9 we got a call saying that he wouldn't be able to meet us until 3 pm as that was the earliest flight from Stanstead he could get. Luckily, there was another guy closer by who could do the same tests, and he met us at the site some time after 11. Everything tested fine, butt here were 2 fairly major delays. 1, Paul spent about an hour trying to send a (completely unrelated) report back to the office through the fairly sketchy dial-up connection, and there was no paper to test the printers because they need some special kind of paper with the perforations down the sides (like those old dot-matrix printers you probably had at school). There was talk that we wouldn't be able to go home until the paper arrived, but that wasn't likely to happen until the Wednesday. Luckily, a couple of phone-calls later and we were homeward bound by around 1 pm.
All in all, it was a good trip. It may have cost me a day off (I was meant to be working the Tuesday anyway), but I'm getting overtime for both days and I learned how to drive a van. I had Stuart's MP3 player and my new copy of Advance Wars: Dark Conflict to keep me entertained, and we saw some pretty cool scenery while on the road (I was like "holy crap, mountains") which made me wish I brought my camera. I'm not back in the office until Saturday evening so I'll have plenty of time to recover, too.