Greensboro - 2

Next morning my body was whining: I didn’t get enough sleep – I have stuffy sinus – my muscles hurt – why do I have to work two days in a row, I’m supposed to be retired – but I got up anyway. My day was begun in the usual way and I was once again waiting for BIL when he arrived at 7:30. We were soon on the limited access roadway that would eventually pass through Atlanta and beyond.

We exited at Greensboro – exit 130 – and arrived at the store and were soon hard at work to complete what we didn’t get through with the day before. I had gotten two major wire runs put in the day before, tip-toeing up on the warehouse racks about 15 feet above a cement floor. These were stapled to the warehouse wall to keep them neat and out of the way. We completed one section left from the day before and then slowly started to install the three phones on the ends of them.

Besides being an old worn-out phone man, I’m an amateur electrician with a fair amount of practice and we had to use this skill as well to install a couple of electrical outlets to make one of the phones work. One of the outlet boxes was not the proper type but fortunately a recently opened Home Depot was just about a half mile up the road and I obtained the right one in short order. The outlets were installed without shocking results and they actually worked when I turned the power back on.

The phone cables were spliced together in the suspended ceilings on the second floor and we broke for lunch. Then began the slow tedious stuff of attaching the right wires to the right places to make the phones work. The DSL filter was installed for the computer systems, as was the com-switch – the controller for the employee’s time clock – and then everything was transferred from the temporary wires to the permanent – and everything worked – what a concept!

Then it was on to the time clock location and this device was installed, as well as the card rack for the employee’s ID cards. Our last job of the day was to check out this clock to see if it would send its information back to the main office and try as we would, this device would not work. Let me offer an excuse right here, my sinus problems had gotten progressively worse all day, along with coughing and sneezing and by this time of the day I was really feeling like unrefrigerated, week-old leftovers.

In this miserable haze, it suddenly dawned on me that we had not checked to see if we could get dial tone to the time clock. I checked this and lo and behold, it was dead – upon checking, I had connected the wrong wire in the wire closet. Correcting this, the clock immediately went to work in the proper way. After a few more minor delays, we finally left and came home – miserable all the way.

Arriving at the home front, I changed clothes and fell into the recliner and except for the necessary calls of nature; I was there all night. The next day and next night found me in the same location with this cold/sinus infection/nasally whatever it was and feeling like I had wrestled two bears, five bobcats, 19 meerkats, 4 fire-ant beds and come out on the losing end of all of them.

Now, a week later, I’m finally coming around and feel some better. Thank the Lord for an immune system that fights off these ornery germs. ec