Unbelabored

I have to admit, one of the nice things about working within the federal infrastructure is that everyone takes off for the Labor Day holiday. Thus I derive the benefits of a shorter four-day workweek this week, without having to pay for it by spending any time today catching up on all the unanswered messages and other business initiated by people who were on the clock on Monday. I work for a government agency that mostly interfaces with other government agencies, so nothing was moving on either side yesterday. Plus, Friday was pretty low-stress as well, since a fair number of people gave themselves a four-day weekend by taking leave on Friday. Plus-plus, the boss-of-bosses gave everyone an additional 59 minutes off as a headstart on the holiday weekend, plus-plus-plus despite the fact that I rolled in at 7:45 on Friday and figured I’d work until 2:46, my immediate supervisor was roaming the cube farm around 2:00 and exhorting everyone to “Go home, go home, go home!” which is not something I am inclined to argue against.

So, yes, a nice little respite which was entirely welcome even in the context of readjusting to workaday doings post-vacation. Of course Labor Day weekend itself was given over almost entirely to getting ready for and then pulling off the little guy’s party for his birthday. Today’s the actual DOB, but Labor Day was the best time to get some friends and family together, and I will return to the subject later in the week at greater length, but to hit the highlights: the party was a success, much fun was had and there were no permanent injuries resulting from physical altercations (amongst the children or the grown-ups) nor any evidence of emotional trauma. We lucked out on the weather, too. Today the little guy got to bring cupcakes with him to school, and has requested “hot dogs, cut up, on hamburger buns” for birthday dinner and so that is what we will be dining on this evening. Then it’s just a matter of getting him to come back down to earth a bit after 48 solid hours of having his every whim catered to, more or less. Should be a fun week.

But getting back to the work stuff (since the blog post subjects are necessarily all screwy given the holiday interruption of programming) – I had mentioned last Monday that there was a new computer sitting on my desk when I returned from the beach, and I wasn’t sure exactly what it was for and what was happening in terms of my overall GFE set-up. One week later and things are somewhat clearer, and the news is mostly excellent: the computer in question was in fact my workstation for doing classified work, and has been situated beneath my desk by a certified positioning professional. Unfortunately it has not yet been connected to the secure network, because there is no such connection point at my desk. They came in and wired the office for secure network hook-ups ages ago, and somehow skipped over my cubicle. So I still need to trudge downstairs to the airless bunker to perform those job duties for now, and “now” will last as long as it takes to get the network hardware guys to come back and correct the oversight. (I am, as you may imagine, not holding my breath.) Normally all of this would be cause to say “I wish instead it had been a new non-classified computer to replace the piece of garbage I contend with for the vast majority of my work, because at least that would be something” but, funny enough, today I was presented with exactly that, as well! So there are three towers sitting under my desk at the moment: the one I’m using, another non-secure box which is supposed to be swapped in sometime on Wednesday or Thursday, and a secure box which has nothing to physically hook up to yet with resolution of that discrepancy TBD. Still, things are looking up!