Starting to say goodbye to the old place

Most of the people in the same office as me will be moving to the new office on Monday, so all this week there has been sorting out drawers and packing. (We move in a few weeks’ time.) There was some drink left over from the two(!) summer parties so a third party happened at the end of the day (supposedly to get rid of the drink 😉 ). Two colleagues chose this as their last day – it’s sad but understandable how many people have left. Our director might not be able to continue sneakily spending his discretionary money on free biscuits for the staff, so the stocks were reduced if not finished too! The unofficial wireless network won’t be moving to the new office, which is a shame and really silly – four people come to a meeting with laptops and then fight over the two network leads supplied.

The best event, which was sad in a way but carried out with such style was switching off a collection of re-commissioned i.e. nicked PCs. Whenever a PC became free in the office it would be disappeared by one of my colleagues and then reappear as a little Linux server, and most people in my department used them rather than the centrally administered machines as they did exactly what we needed them to do, and were quick too. A colleague of mine maintained them in his spare time, and because they weren’t centrally administered he was free to play and invent, and came up with some very useful programs. My sole contribution to the whole thing was to suggest that they be named after stations on the shipping forecast, oh and to listen to their fans and hard disks whirr away on the desk behind me all the time.

The office move was used as an opportunity by IT Services to clamp down, and the Linux boxes weren’t going to move with us. Instead we have some central machines that are supposedly big and fast enough – time will tell. Instead of just turning them off, the Linux admin and his mate did it properly. First of all, Sailing By starting playing from one of them. Then the mate started reading a shipping forecast he’d written, which was very funny, particularly as two colleagues’ surnames were the same as some machine names. As each name was mentioned the relevant PC would open and shut its CD drawer. After the last one, there were the beeps as in a time check on the radio, and then they turned themselves off. (Cron jobs are clever things in the hands of people as skilled as the Linux admin.)

Bye little Linux boxes. I won’t miss your noise, but thanks. All the names decommissioned, it’s a bit like Slow Train.