(Days of work remaining until holiday time off: 7)
Christmas is gonna be wild this year.
I am convinced that I will win Christmas this year -- even more than the year where I gifted the parents a $400 iPad that I'd won in a work raffle -- a raffle I'd specifically entered for them because hey, it was 2016, I didn't need an iPad. But Mom and Dad did, because theirs was too old to really use anymore.
I've said that each year, if possible, I try to create something for the parents and the family if I can. Yes, there are years where I've just purchased things due to time, creativity, or plain stress, but if I have the time and energy I do try to make something.
A few years back I got a soldering iron with some special craft-related wood-burning tips for it, some unfinished wooden plaques and wood stain, and a thick polyurethane lacquer -- and I made plaques with everyone's names on them. For Daisy's sister's family, it was a big cutting board made of olive wood and purchased from HomeGoods, and put the family name on it.
That was then. The future is now, old man.
I have completed the run of tapes that I brought over from the parents' last weekend. Some of the tapes are blanks, some contain what appears to be documentaries or taped news coverage (Mom likely used this when she was working/teaching at the school); some have kids' programming on them (Barney, Elmo, etc). The rest were all family videos dating from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. There are still more in the house, of course. The parents and Daisy do not currently know where they are. Daisy said I likely got most of them, but I do not think I did. The family has a decent idea of a general area they might be in, and I'll likely look for them tomorrow when I return this big box of tapes to them. I have a little more than two weeks before Christmas to find them, digitize them, and get the videos onto flash drives for the family if I want it to be ready for the holidays.
The recording software has its limitations -- for example, I can record anything as long as I want, but once it reaches over a certain size (generally around 4-5GB) I can't move it off my hard drive for some reason -- it says the file is too big for its destination, even when there's way more than enough room on my portable external HD as well as the flash drives. 4-5GB is about an hour of video, give or take, so anything longer than that must be broken into chunks. I digitized an entire school play last night and it's too large to put on the flash drives -- I'll have to re-record it all over again and break it into chunks.
That play, by the way, is Miracle on 34th Street -- and one of the most absolutely unhinged versions of the story I have ever seen. It includes:
- Liberal usage of the Seinfeld theme in the most inappropriate places
- A metal version of the Inspector Gadget theme (no, I'm not kidding)
- Liberal usage of the Night Court theme for no real reason
- Liberal usage of Yello's "Oh Yeah" -- yes, the song from Ferris Bueller, also in the most inappropriate places
- Liberal usage of the Perry Mason theme
- High schoolers playing old men and women, but
- Actual old men and women playing old men and women too
- Intermissions that whoever recording the tape didn't pause through, so it's just a black screen with people coughing/talking in the background while tinny Christmas music is playing
- Entire sections of the play that's just spoken dialogue with a black stage, where I guess the action is supposed to take place in the viewer's mind. And yes, this is intentional and bizarre -- whoever was making the recording was zoomed in on the stage as if they were like "uh, is it supposed to be dark?"
It is one of the lowest-quality recordings I've digitized yet, but not because of the tape -- the tape is fine; it's the angles and zooms that makes everyone slightly blurry. It's watchable, but barely.
Daisy and her oldest sister are in it; Daisy is an extra (one of the children in the background in several scenes; she waits in line and actually sits on Santa's lap at one point), while her oldest sister has a rather large part waaaaaaay at the end of the play in the last twenty or so minutes when Santa is on trial (spoilers?).
In talking to Mom about it, the play is from when they lived in Iowa, approximately 1998 or 1999. Daisy would've been in middle school at the time and her oldest sister was in high school (probably why she was in the play).
Anyway.
To assist me in all of these endeavors, last week when I knew this would be a thing, I purchased five 128GB flash drives from Amazon -- one for the parents, one for each of Daisy's sisters, one for us to keep (so these videos don't permanently live on my hard drive), and a spare in the event we'd need one, if one got lost or failed/was defective. I mentioned this here before. What I didn't mention is that for the first time in a decade, I purchased a new external HDD to use as a backup. The backup external HDD I've had since 2013 or so is a 500GB HDD. It works wonderfully and up until now has proven to be more than adequate for my storage needs, as my PC's internal HDD is 2TB. However, these videos I'm recording are massive and there could still be 20-30 tapes to go that I haven't found yet. I need somewhere to put all that data in the event that my PC suffers a sudden catastrophic failure -- which has, of course, happened before, and I need room to spare for anything I can find in the future.
The new external HDD is 4TB, eight times more space than the one I've been using for a decade. It was a little over $100 on Amazon and I've had an eye on it for some time. No better time than now to pull the trigger, I suppose, when I'm going to be spending the next few weeks needing as much space as I can get my hands on.
Now comes the process of moving everything off the old backup drive onto the new one -- while I backup my files regularly from my PC, the old backup drive contains a lot of stuff not currently on this PC and not currently saved anywhere but on that drive (so that I don't take up more space on my computer's HDD than I have to). Easiest way to transfer is to get those files onto my PC again, then to fully back up all of my current files onto the new drive along with those ones.
Please note: I am well-aware that describing this process is likely mind-numbingly boring for most of you.
Anyway.
The 22.6GB of video I've saved from these tapes so far is a total of about six hours of footage. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the space I have, but again, I don't know what's left in the basement. This is only about fifteen tapes I have so far. Even if this is it, if this is all I can get before the holidays, it's been worth it.
This week went remarkably fast at work, and I don't exactly know how because it honestly wasn't easy. I have wished and hoped for these last remaining days I have to be there before vacation to go quickly and quietly, and it's likely that the closer we get to the actual holidays, the work will dwindle down and the nights will be quieter as our clients begin going on extended vacations for those holidays.
At least, that's the way it generally happens every year. Some years are anomalies all their own.
All coverage has been pretty finalized for the holidays for overnights; I've done the work there myself to make sure the holiday shifts have enough staffing. I do this for every holiday, because -- if I don't -- nobody else cares enough to do it. I do get some gratitude from the higher-ups for it, but nowhere near enough for the amount of work I put into it. Add to this that nobody wants to work holidays, so I feel like an absolute dick asking the teams, essentially, "hey, do you want to sacrifice personal and family time for the sake of a soulless telecom conglomerate?"
As an aside, I think it's absolute horseshit that there aren't holidays where everything shuts down and businesses close and stay closed until they're over. Well, there are, for some companies. We do not. I am very resentful that what we do operates 24/7/365 like we perform emergency services or something like that. Trust me, we don't. Clients can be inconvenienced for a day at a time sometimes, over a holiday, and nobody's going to die. Shit will still get fixed. I long for the day where every job, especially mine, is like the postal service -- yep, we're closed down hard on all of these different days of the year and also, all of our leadership has weekends off. Oh, also, Saturdays are spotty for deliveries and general mail, so...best of luck. If you want to complain about any of our services, go for it, but nobody cares. We'll handle your stuff in business hours. Deal with it.
That will likely never happen for my place of work. But, a man can dream.
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