Slice of sky

One of the things I like about my apartment is the amount of sky I can see, considering the local population density.  If I get home before sunset, I can often watch the storms roll through.

After the rain, I saw broken clouds and blue sky.

The admin assistant for the group says that it takes about a year for new employees to learn the job. My boss joked that he threw 8000 things at me in my first two weeks. Not all of the things I need to learn are purely technical.

Last week, I asked him who I should contact to do a task that requires superuser permission on the network computer for me.  He replied that I should do it myself; I have superuser privileges.  Gulp.  I had been entrusted with superuser privileges on #29 of the world's fastest supercomputers and no one thought it was worth mentioning to me?  Fortunately, I didn't break it.  ;-)

I take that back.  I may or may not have been responsible for the tape drive crash slowdown last week.  I was trying to fix the metadata on some data that had been sprayed across thousands of different tapes over the last 15 years.  I envisioned making the IBM 3495-style yellow tape robots play Twister.

But I learned that the new-fangled tape robots I am using don't have the long articulated arms of earlier generations.

Am I the only curmudgeon, or do you also miss the quirkiness of old technologies? The IBM Selectric let us type faster, but did you miss watching the key arms along their trajectory?