Tuesday 20 August 2013

IT Girl - Hard drives, heavy lifting and hammocks

The more astute reader may have noticed the slight time lag between when these articles are written and when they are published. As of now, it is the first Monday of August and the weather is bloody miserable. Having spent the morning trudging around with masses of A3 paper, the IT girl resembles a drowned rat and is dripping on her keyboard.
Weather-based trauma aside, my first payday has come and my National Insurance contribution has flown off. I don't feel particularly hard done by in that respect, as I won't be paying tax on my stipend for the next four years and I really have managed to get a lot of NHS for my contributions (around £100) so far.
The task of recent days has been to scrap a large number of PCs and bits of equipment that are well past their use-by dates. Mostly, this means those beige Viglen desktops with 1GB memory and their accompanying CRT screens. There are a surprising number of these on the site, considering how a lot of the science they do here requires masses of computing power and graphic software. I suppose people just don't like change.
When machines get disposed of, the hard drives must be removed and stored (and eventually thoroughly destroyed); a horribly dirty task. Not only are the innards of most peoples' computers filled with dust and hair, but one even had a spider in it. I beg of you all, take a mini-vacuum to your desktop at least one a year...
Other than the general filth, the biggest problem with these very old machines is their sheer weight. I cannot physically lift them, or the Nokia CRT screens that have been know to accompany them (apparently Nokia made computer screens back in the day). Under the health and safety regulations, I am apparently not even allowed to lift something over 5.5kg without wearing heavy boots. I may be quite a feeble example of humanity but that does seem rather low, especially considering our pet cat weighs more than that...
There is, however, a simple solution to this problem. The easiest way I have found to move heavy object from an office to the workshop (a ground floor room in the next building along) is to bat my eyelashes and look as pathetic as possible in a room full of men. Feminist it may not be, but it saves my back and gives everyone else a chance to stretch their legs...
Official work hammock.
Working 9 to 5, throughout the entirety of the long summer hols is, quite frankly, exhausting. All I really want to do is laze around in the sun and occasionally paddle in the river. However, rents must be paid and all that, so here I am. However, a brief lunchtime-exploitation of the site with a couple of fellow summer students lead to the discovery of hammocks in a small wooded area near a wind turbine.
Who put the hammocks there, and why, we are yet to decipher. Though this week perhaps the weather is far from ideal, hopefully the occasional long lunch spent reclined in comfort in the shade of the trees will go some way to making up a holiday.
Probably not.

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