Computer equipment irks me. The various gizmos I need to work every day are becoming too numerous. When I was in the office, my laptop was tethered to a docking station beneath a dual monitor arm holding two screens, and my keyboard and mouse were hooked up to the dock instead of the USB ports on the laptop. It was a perfect setup.
Once I packed up to work from home back in March, I took the laptop and power cord with me, because I already had a wireless keyboard and mouse to go with them (I use them for meetings away from the office), and I figured that, for a couple of months, I could make do with one monitor screen.
So much for that idea. We are now if our eighth month of home office Hades, and the management felt it was time to set me and my other crew mates up for remote phone access. Since the laptop has only two USB ports, and one of them will be for the headphones, that causes a problem.
Today I traveled to the office, for only the second time since March, to pick up my docking station. I’m not an IT person, but I figured there had to be a logic to taking down and assembling a workstation, so I was determined to figure it out.
There is nothing more daunting than looking at a mess of power cords, especially when they’re out of reach, and these were delicately woven into the arm of the dual monitor stand in such a way as to make them obscured from view for aesthetics and, therefore, impossible to disassemble without prior knowledge of the equipment or the owners manual. I ended up unplugging everything and then checking out the layout on another station that I could actually look at (with a flashlight, because the department lights were out).
I never knew I could still contort myself at my age.
After figuring out what plugged into where, I packed up the docking station. I then had to also pack up a pile of catalogs which had come in the mail. I had ordered one or two things to ship to the office, and that mistake caused every catalog in the country to catch onto where I was. Those will be examined for address labels and then discarded for recycling, plus I’ll have to contact them to say I’m not there right now. You’d think they could have figured that out.
Lastly, I checked out the boss’ tree. It was a sad and drooping thing, because it doesn’t get the benefits of interior lighting and the maintenance crew was apparently over-watering it. I drained its pot, and part of the liquid landed on my trouser leg.
I drove home with a smelly pant leg reeking of brackish old plant water, a bag with my docking station and a bunch of old catalogs, and the feeling that I’ll be doing more contortions putting my expanded workstation together in the days to come than I could ever want.
By the end of this, I may have a degree in IT.
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