I take it all back!

Send me to Bishop, anyday.

I won't kid you...I was not looking forward to the Bishop trip. You may remember my last visit up here was on the tail end of an already long road trip to Sacramento, and back again. By the time we headed out after that long haul, we were toast -- and the few memories of the trip leave a bad taste in your mouth.

This time however, I was driving with my good buddies Stevie Ray Vaugh, Jimmy Hendrix, and Eric Clapton. They provided a lot of good times and made the long drive relatively breezy. Of course they also induced a healthy dose of leadfootosis on my lower extremities that attributed to the "breeziness"of the whole thing.

Lets just say a few jackrabbits on the 395 have their ears bent backwards...permanently.

Our Bishop office is one seriously disharmonious ship. We have three employees working there...none of which seem happy about it. The salesperson is from South Africa and chatters incessantly. At any moment you expect him to try and sell you some miracle car polish with that accent. The service tech is relatively competent and seems to keep things tidy, however the connectivity tech is something to behold.

Apparently we're paying a guy an hourly wage to not work. Seriously.

Seems this guy walks into the office in the morning, logs in, and then goes home...only to log back out at closing time. Sure he occasional works on something...but apparently he's either an idiot or not interested in actually doing his job. He leaves his company cell phone in the office just in case you actually do cook up some need for him, and intentionally has his system working independently outside our network. Since it's actually his personal computer, it's full of non-work related stuff.

He's also a Packer fan, so he's got a long way to go with me.

Apparently he's a super cool guy though. And to be honest, I like him in spite of his work ethic. He's a total surfer dude, underwear model looking kind of guy. You know this type...he's the one you want tagging along as a wing-man when you hit the clubs, because he scores hot chicks in groups. Apparently his wife lives down in LA (don't ask me) and he has plans to move there next month and leave the company. Of course, from what I hear that's been the plan for over a year now...so who knows?

All I know is that once you get one of them alone in a room, that person immediately begins to stab the other two in the back. It's downright hilarious. The MOMENT the other two leave the room, I'm not kidding!


Look at some of the stuff I get to work on around here!!!

I didn't even know we had the Owens Valley Radio Observatory as a customer. They just gave me an address but I was grinnin' from ear to ear when I saw the large array on the horizon. I got to work on a few things I can't talk about here as well, and as usual they were super cool.

I'll tell you what's really cool about taking a service job at a location full of radio satellite and electrical engineers is though; parts! These guys have everything! I was pulling an old print board from one of the machines at the base, and found that I suddenly needed two jumpers to bypass the boot sequence.


~~~> Enter the nerds!

It was kind of creepy how they all came out of their offices at the same time -- each with a whole host of jumper kits. They must have heard me calling off the j26 and j27 points and just put two and two together when they heard me cursing under my breath. Either way, they all had jumpers in their hands and seemed like they were competing for which one I would take the parts from.


OH! And I made a snow angel!!

Pretty cool eh?