Saturday, February 11, 2006

Turned Off

I had the late shift in work tonight. Normally on a Saturday this would entail me finishing work at about 9pm, as the store shuts at 8pm and it takes about an hour to do the closedown and such on the computers. Not tonight though, I was there until 10:30pm this time. Granted my shift had started an hour later, as I knew that I'd be staying late in advance.

The reason for this is... well actually I don't know the reason, only the cause. Tonight I spent about an hour and a half racing around the store turning off every piece of electronic equipment in the store such as: computers, servers, printers, tills, scales and these big ass terminal things called Bizerba's. Not only did I have to turn them off, I also had to unplug them from the wall.

That second part proved a bit tricker, as not only were a lot of the plugs a weird design called electrax (which twist to the side, rather than pull straight out, which took me a few tugs to figure out), but many of them are in damnably hard to reach locations. Clearly whoever wired up our store during the refit last year, thought it'd be a laugh to do so in such a manner. I guess so as to ensure that when it came to unplug the equipment, whoever was doing so would have a few choice curses to utter whilst doing so. I know I certainly did!

The guide I had to work by, said that the whole operation should take about 30 mins. I'd like to see the git who wrote that try it. Maybe in a store half the size of ours it might be possible. We have 24,500 square feet though, and that's a lot to dash around. And I still don't know why we had to unplug everything, only that it gets done once a year. Something about an electrical test or other.

Still as tiring as turning everything off and unplugging it was, my sympathies go to my colleague Ben Harvey, as tomorrow morning he has the unenviable task of plugging everything back in and turning it all back on. Rather him than me!

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