Bats and Leathermen and Hunter

10 Aug 2007

When I got my first job in IT, a friend of mine bought me a copy of the third edition of Unix in a Nutshell. (Incidentally, why does O'Reilly's search, which in my client returns "Sorry, no matches were found containing ." (sic), suck so much?) Sure, it was help desk on a small ISP, but it was something. I read that book front to back on the bus to and from work, and filled it full of stickers from all the servers or PCs I assembled.

The sysadmin at that first job also had a cordless drill, and that made things so much easier when assembling or racking servers. I wanted one, but I didn't buy one 'cos I figured I hadn't earned it yet. When my Italian millwright father-in-law bought me one, I felt like it was a vote of confidence in a way.

Another thing the sysadmin had was a Leatherman Wave. Again, I wanted one, but I didn't think I'd earned it yet. Last week, I decided to get one; and if I was going to get one, I was going to wear the damn thing. I started wearing the sheath on my belt, and waited for a chance to use it.

Today I had that chance.

I got to work and went to the kitchen to grab a coffee. "There's a bat behind the fridge," I heard.

What?

The cleaning woman pointed. "I moved out the fridge to clean it," she said. "There was a bat behind it. I don't want to touch it."

I looked, and sure enough there was one hanging by the edge of the cupbard. It was small, like a mouse wearing an overcoat. (Goth mouse?)

And then my moment came.

There were no gloves (I was worried about rabies), but there was a towel. I draped the towel over the bat while frightened coworkers watched, and then covered it with a recycling bin.

And then I took out the Leatherman, and flipped out the knife. "I need help cutting cardboard," I said, and the receptionist came to help. She sliced up a cardboard box and gave me a square of it. I slid it between the cupboard and the towel, sandwiching the bat gently between it and the towel, with the recycling bin behind.

I carried it outside to a clump of trees (ah, the advantages of living on a beautiful campus), found a stick, coaxed it onto it and then left it up a tree.

But I couldn't have done it...

...without the Leatherman.

(This writing style brought to you by my third reading of Battlefield Earth. Our motto: Yeah, it's trash...so what?)

In other news, Hunter Matthews is giving a workshop on server room best practices at LISA '07. I met him at LISA last year, when he was another attendee of an otherwise thin tutorial on setting up server rooms/closet. He was also at the documentation BOF, and the one who said "I've got one user who considers 7-bit ASCII a luxury compared to what you can get from 5 or 6 bits." (Oh, and: "Cooperative collaboration. Yeah, its part of our vision statement.") He's a good guy and a good teacher, and if you're going to LISA you could do a lot worse than going to his workshop.