March 13, 2002
Dear Everyone:
It has happened at last. A miracle has occurred. The curse has been lifted.
I finally got kicked out of the Jury Box.
Last week, I reported for Jury Duty as required by law. I wouldn’t have minded serving; the trial couldn’t have lasted more than two or three days, tops. A couple of drug-related misdemeanors. I could have had breakfast every day at the coffee shop next to the courthouse, lunch up the street at the burger place. Stop at the cosmetic counter in the department store on the way home.
But it would also have meant rescheduling a dental appointment made seven months ago, and a couple of meetings involving a lot of other people. So maybe it’s just as well that I said something that scared the PD (Public Defender) so much that he booted me even before the Deputy District Attorney from the Department of Justice.
Things are starting to heat up at work. Several projects that have been sitting on the back burner have been moved forward. I have training tomorrow on one document handling system and a “brain-dump” scheduled for another system for Friday morning with a vendor.
On the plus side, we finally got all the retention categories changed on all the boxes in the records management system. So that project is officially completed. However, since most of the people who were involved with it at the beginning are either gone or in some other job now, don’t expect a big party to celebrate.
Speaking of celebrations, I have a birthday coming up and decided to buy myself a nice present: A new computer. It arrived last week. And tomorrow, after work, a helpful coworker has offered to put the three boxes it came in into the back of his nice, big truck and bring them up to my place. After that, I will need to move some files from the old PC to the new one, and uninstall some applications that “Jeannie” either doesn’t need or wouldn’t use anyway.
This will take some time, so it probably won’t happen except on a weekend. Or during some vacation that I’m planning on taking the week after next. Not that there’s any great hurry on “Jeannie’s” part. She’ll need to clean up her office in order to make room for the “new” PC. But once she does, she’ll have a computer that can handle all the graphics that she keeps pulling up on eBay. She’ll also have a place to store her jobs and maybe even have a backup copy of her special application in case of emergencies.
In the meantime, we haven’t seen any new movies. Last Saturday was spent at the hairdresser, getting badly overdue haircuts. (Hairdresser went out of town on our regularly scheduled weekend.) Then we tried in vain to find a fashion show that we’d been invited to for the same afternoon. After a fruitless search, we gave up and had lunch instead. (When in doubt, Lunch.)
I spent Sunday importing about 35,000 records into the aforementioned records management system. This left only a few thousand stragglers still using old retention categories. I spent the first part of this week dragging those, kicking and screaming, into their respective corrals, then deleting the old categories.
There’s a nice sense of accomplishment when you can actually proclaim a project officially completed, instead of just watching it flounder and eventually sink to the bottom without anyone really noticing. Plus, it gives me something to put into the Weekly Update.
The Weekly Update is something I started doing in October, 1994. It originally began as a way to let Users know what was happening as we migrated from one system to the next. And the next. And the next. After this next conversion, I won’t be the System Administrator anymore and can cheerfully let someone else take over the Weekly Updates.
And I won’t miss them a bit. Well, maybe just a little bit. Then again, maybe not.
Love, as always,
Pete
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