Re-open for business

They say time seems to go by faster and faster as you age (for obvious proportion-of-the-whole reasons) and I guess vacations are no exception. A week in the Outer Banks went by in the blink of an eye, and here I am back at work once again. I’d like to say that my mental batteries are fully recharged and I’m now ready to finish the year strong, but … they key revelation for both my wife and myself this past week was the wide gulf between a “vacation” and a “family vacation” – the latter being what we got, which meant taking care of a toddler and a pre-schooler with all the usual early rising mornings and juggled nap times and dinner-bath-bedtime rituals same as always. We didn’t have to go to work (which is undeniably a valuable respite) and we had a certain amount of help from grandparents and other extended family members (which we appreciated deeply) but if a “vacation” is a prolonged period of uninterrupted self-indulgence, a “family vacation” is … pretty much not.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean the week was by any means bad! It was all sorts of happy lovely fun and I will of course delve into details a bit more as this week rolls along, but I was making a point about how it feels to be back at work in terms of my overall energy level and motivation and so forth, and in that specific regard it’s as if I never left.

One way in which things in my cubicle are not the same as when I departed is embodied in the large pile of computer equipment sitting on the corner of my desk. None of it is hooked up at the moment, and in fact much of it is still in boxes. I haven’t touched it myself, figuring that the actual installation should be performed by an authorized member of the IT staff, which (despite the frequent assumptions around these parts) does not include me. Not too long ago we got new monitors, and I was happy to set that single component up on my own, but an actual computer that needs to be recognized by the network and whatnot? I can wait.

And it’s ultimately a good thing that I did, because once I fired up my old computer and started checking through my e-mails, I began to question what exactly this new hardware on my desk was for. My initial thought had been that it was a brand new unclassified tower, which had been promised some time in the hazy past and which would be wonderful because my current machine is a painfully sluggish, borderline obsolescent piece of garbage. But, you may recall, we are also at some point supposed to get classified computers here in the office, to obviate the need to trek down eight floors to a windowless vault in order to perform any required duties utilizing the secure network. So perhaps this new computer sitting at arm’s length from me is said classified workstation at long last. I suppose whenever someone shows up to set it up, I’ll be informed. Probably!