Yeah it really sucks when shit like ALS happens to someone and debilitates them and they have no control or no blame for it even happening. That is shitty.
I just thank god for Amphenol cables when I do that work. I dont want to have to run all those wires
LOL I helped, as in doing the physical work, set up my first data center. It had an elevated floor and we ran cables and cooling through the floor. It was dirty, confusing, long hours, and expensive. It was on the first floor of an old factory, a woolen factory. The 2nd floor was not fit for use, but we had to hire a company to come in and clean it.
We did a lot of the cleaning on the first floor ourselves, hiring in day labor when we could afford it. See, as I said, it was an old woolen factory. That may not mean a lot, but Boston (and surrounding areas) were huge parts of the textile trade. So, imagine wool fibers - and lots of un-planed wooden surfaces. Now, scale that up to the size of a giant factory...
When we moved to North Carolina, there was still wool to be found in the joint. No matter how much it was cleaned, there was still wool hiding around the place. It was fucking horrible. The place in NC was built-to-suit (and like 8 million dollars, including the property) but was a much nicer place. That was our main office - which shouldn't be confused with the lab that was located elsewhere - in Winston-Salem, NC. It was in the business district and wasn't owned by us - it was leased. They also did the build-to-suit thing, but it was really remodeling an existing structure and adding a couple of things like a fence and a guard shack.
We got help from a company known as with our servers and workstations. They'd later sell to Compaq and were acquired by HP. HP continued to sell gear from DEC which we used to keep our existing infrastructure alive while we transitioned to a mostly Sun-shop. Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2010, but I was retired by then. I have no fucking clue what they use today. I would expect it's still sticking largely with HP.
Holy balls, there's a fuck-ton of memories that just kinda wafted back into my head.
It was a lifetime ago.
Sounds like a hell of a lot of work. Hope those memories are good ones!
The work sucked - but I was working for myself. They say you'll never work harder than you will when you work for yourself. I found that to be true in many ways.
At the same time, I had done really, really difficult physical labor and considered that worse. I'd rather spend 80 hours working at a computer, driving to a site, or doing field work, than I'd rather spend 60 hours working as a laborer for a concrete company.
Shit, I'd rather do 80 hours of that work than do 40 hours working for a concrete company.
I wasn't making the concrete, I was the fucker in the hole lugging heavy fucking forms all over the place - and then lifting the fuckers back out of the hole when you're done! Then, I carried 'em to a truck that was stacked 12' high. I had to carry the fucking things on my shoulder. I still have scar tissue on that shoulder and I haven't done that work since like 1987.
It did pay pretty well to work concrete. So, that helped.
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