Coming up for air: moving an office

Yes, I've been light on the blogging this month. I've been helping to move an office, and it takes quite a lot of effort. Chief among the work contributers being that we have two (2) support-type people in the DC office, and I'm one of 'em. Where in this case 'support' means 'supports the office's primary function', which in larger offices would include:

  • The Facilities team who keep everyone in heat, cooling, and power, as well as put a damper on structural decay
  • The network engineers who keep the phones and data going
  • The office-admins who make sure all the various supplies are kept up to stock, usually invisibly.
  • The people-facing IT team who fix broken computers

Our DC office has at most 12 people in it during a normal day, only two of whom fit into the above. Me and the person who fills the third bullet point up there. She was doing 9/10ths of the job of getting the new office built, ordering movers, coordinating new furniture, talking to the contractors whenever they hit a snag, and all that stuff. Me? I'm the Speaker to Networks. This is a new role for me, but I've got enough depth in the field I can fake it reasonably.

I'm also better-than-average at the whole HVAC thing, what with HVAC being a primary concern for server health. However, that only came up during the 5 times I got asked "you want HOW much cooling in that closed room?" (4KVA if you must know). They kept not believing me, even after I pointed to the pair of L5-30 outlets they were going to install. Where's that power going, huh? I'd rather over-cool than under-cool, you know.

But... we're in. Even though this move was a true tragi-comedy of errors, the old hands assure me that the previous one was worse. I'll have to get THAT story once the raw wounds from this one heal over a bit more.

I'll probably post pictures once I've had more sleep. 19 hours of work since close-of-business Friday.