Busy day

I headed to work knowing that I needed to do two things: perform routine, easy cryogenic maintenance on an instrument, and power-cycle a network camera used during remote operation, which was unhappy after the other day's power outage.

So I got those things sorted out, and then the phone rang.  It was my boss, who wanted to know if our engineer had talked to me about one of the computers needing to be rebooted. He hadn't, so I found out that last night, a computer decided not to start back up after being power-cycled.  I went down to the computer room, found it, and turned it back on.

While I was doing that, I noticed that another computer in the room was beeping persistently, so I looked at it, figured out what the problem was, and went back upstairs to tell the guy in charge of it (who's 2300 miles away).  Just then, the engineer called and told me how to fix that one, so I fixed it, too.

Having fixed everything that needed fixing in the building, I headed home.  About 4 miles down the road, there's a stretch of dirt road, some of it steep, and I came across a father and son with a 2WD pickup truck that hadn't been able to make it up the steep bits, and had then managed to get stuck turning around.  The truck was blocking half the road, so I stopped and talked to them and wound up giving them a bit of a tug to get them unstuck.

(Later I found out I'm probably not supposed to help people get un-stuck if I'm in a truck from work, for liability reasons.  Fortunately, everything went okay with the un-sticking.  And I wrote a note promising not to un-stick or un-block anything in the future. :)

The tally for the day:

1. Did cryogenic maintenance on the instrument.
2. Power-cycled the network camera
3. Rebooted a computer
4. Made another computer stop beeping
5. Un-stuck a pickup truck