Cleaning the Lab

I've been working Meaghan's overnight shift, and somehow randomly decided it would be cool to finally go ahead and clean up the lab desk area. I'm not going to lie, I enjoyed it. Probably a little bit too much, but it's something I have wanted to do all semester, and having done so gives me this weird feeling of accomplishment.

The main inspiration to clean the lab desk was the note put up by the South Lab director, saying that the Overnight people are to clean the lab station. My big problem with this is that there seems to have been no actual communication between Labs staff and Academic Computing Help Desk staff in this decision.

After having gotten it done and having gotten everything put back into place, I feel like I should have done this a very long time ago. The whole area was very grungy, and extraordinarily dusty. Being a bit of a clean freak myself, I'm not entirely sure how they were able to stand it day in and day out, the main thing is that there were massive amounts of used staples and huge piles of old dust. Not just dust, I think much of it was old dust.

They didn't just have dust. It was very, very old dust. Old dust that was probably last addressed in 2005 or so when the OptiPlex GX270 machines SCLLAB1 and SCLLAB2 were brand new. The cables were disorganized and a mess, and the workspace suffered from pretty terrible choices in the exact placement of the machines.

I even re-did some of the wiring on the left computer, whose wires were very badly messed up. A nifty little advantage of the re-wiring is that the overnight staff can pull the phone out a bit more to get easier access to it while on a call and printing at the same time. It may be fine for the daytime lab staff that shouldn't be on the phone.

Over the summer I'm kind of going to miss this desk, especially now that I've put so much effort into de-grunging it. Ah well, at least I won't have to suffer the moral question of whether or not to let a student sans-ID into the lab before 8 a.m.