The Situation
Losing his job gave us some much appreciated freedom to spend team time concentrating on the project, but not as much as you might think. Job search is a full time pursuit as is running a Kickstarter Funding Campaign. One of us will need to be employed really soon. I’ve been out of the job market for a while, so Russ is more likely to be able to get something good enough soon enough.
The Tech
It’s been 5 days since Russ got the ax. He spent the first two getting all his personal data off the company phone and laptop and deciding what to do about a new phone and carrier. It wasn’t a simple wipe. He didn’t have a personal phone and only recently got a personal laptop. He almost never hits delete.
We looked at mobile carrier ratings. For now, he’s going to put an old phone we weren’t using on Ting, a Canadian carrier. We’ll go out and test signal strength in remote trail areas (with an app, not subjectively) . If there’s no significant difference, I’ll can AT&T with pleasure and join him on Ting. Signal strength in rural Alabama where my mother lives is why we kept AT&T past the first few terrible experiences, and fiber in our own neighborhood was why we kept them after the rest. If we still can’t get fiber at the house, at least we can downsize our mobile bill.
Training
Russ has changed flats 4 times this week.1 new tire, 4 new tubes. All things considered, he showed amazing tolerance. In fact, he showed some pretty impressive tolerance just for a guy trying to have a bike ride with no goals or stress. We did finally get some good ride time in though, and some good recovery exercise walks too. One was at Kennesaw Mountain, and another was at a local park. I still got more ride time in than Russ, because of the flats. I expect we’ll have some good riding next week though.
Working The Plan
When we didn’t have weekdays to work together on the project, we were going to take off last weekend and use the office where Russ works (correction, worked) to get away from the distractions in the house and concentrate some long hard hours on the project. We stayed with the plan, but moved the location to the basement at my son’s new house. He spent most of the weekend out, so it worked as intended.
The work was slow. Russ had trouble finding files because he started the campaign video on my computer, where I was also working (and sometimes moving files that I didn’t know he needed to stay in the same file path). Then there was the whole musical computers game, we’ve kept working through introduction of 4 laptops and 2 external drives now (with hindsight instituted protocols). Finding all the parts to remake the video was frustrating, and not made better by “I just lost my paycheck” stress. We had far too much work left to have been successful over just the weekend. I don’t know where the project will go now, but it would be over had he not been let go.
We got an opening, and the void was instantly filled. That time that Russ has between what he was doing an what he will do next may not be enough for one thing, let alone all the things we’d like to fit in it. There are still more hopes and obligations than there is time. We’re still juggling, first optimism, then 20 other things. We’re still hoping it all works out for the best, whatever that may be.
Have a glorious day, and, see you on the trail