Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Fort Geek

I've taken on a side project at work.
As I've written before, it is my responsibility to build out all forty-something servers for our Business Continuity plan.
They are being configured here to be boxed back up and shipped to our out-of-state hot site. There, they will be unboxed, placed gingerly in racks, and powered on as a fully functional replica of our server environment. Sounds pretty doesn't it?
Anyway, I've run into an interesting side effect of the whole "matter is neither created or destroyed" nonsense.
You see, as I move the servers one by one out of the space we are borrowing from the Help Desk, I diminish the massive pile of server boxes.
Each server is a substantial reduction in the size of the pile. These are large servers packed in larger foam-filled boxes. Each box is about half the height and size of the front end of a 1987 Toyota Supra.
Side note - - A guy I went to high school with had a 1987 Toyota Supra. I hated that guy.
I can't ditch the boxes, because we need them to ship the servers to their new home in our super-secret bunker-style Disaster Recovery Hot Site.
I also can't return the boxes to the borrowed space on our floor. First, it seems rude. I free up space only to fill it back up again? Not nice. More importantly, there is no way to put the empty boxes in the back so I'd have to move them all to get at the unopened, server-filled boxes.
My solution was to set the empty boxes outside my cubicle. Right outside.
At the moment there are several, stacked like Lego almost to the tile ceiling, closing off about a foot of the entrance to my cubicle.
There are a few side-effects to this practice.
A person can't wander through the hall and see me, for one. I've created my own closet-like cardboard tomb that people naturally avert their gaze from. This is probably why the floor Fire Wardens haven't carted me off to be flogged. It just isn't something a reasonable person wants to think about. Also, it is a neat stack, so it looks intentional. If it looked haphazard I'm sure I'd have been called on it.
Further, it shields me from the paper balls and rubber bands of outrageous fortune.
Six more boxes and I can completely seal off my cubicle, allowing me to launch offensives against my co-workers with impunity. I can get in and out by climbing the handy Dell-provided hand holds cut into the crates, or, in the event of a fire, I can crash through them, Hulk-like, to build momentum for my mad dash to the stair well.
I mean "Calm and orderly evacuation".
My co-workers hate Fort Geek. It obstructs the hallway and the smaller mortar boxes tend to fall out at inopportune times. But I'm an I.T. person, not an architect.

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