On the Job At Last

I awoke yesterday morning to find my faucets without water. It was my first day of work! I should have brought my camera. Pictures will be forthcoming. I share a room on Enlace’s third (top) floor with Hilda, Miguel Angel (Mike), Pablo, and my boss Jesús. Most of my day was spent installing and configuring a lightweight open-source WAMP server called Server2Go and Joomla, the CMS used here. My first project is interesting. It involves providing local businesses with a sort of user-sourced yellow pages. It’s totally on par with my past work. If I play my cards right, I may even get a chance to work with a bit of GIS.

My coworkers are a lot of fun. Jesús likes to have fun. While we were struggling with an installation task, he told a poignant joke. It went something like this:

A chemist, a physicist, a mechanic, and developer are in a car when it suddenly stops. The chemist proceeds to calculate the volume of gasoline left in the tank and determine the relative quantities of oil, octane, etcetera, required to go further. The Physicists measures the incline of the road and the diameter of the tires, estimating the amount of torque and forward momentum required to overcome gravity and inertia, etc. The mechanic inspects the transmission, alternator, carburetor, and so forth. The developer’s solution is to turn everything off and then on again, get out of the car, open all the doors and shut them again.

I returned to my house to find this beast of a truck roaring away as it pumped water through a hose into the deposito in the rear of my house.

Don Chomo informed me that I had left on a faucet and this was the cause of my missing water. When the hot water (“hot” being a relative term) runs out, instead of running cold, it ceases altogether, but the machine that pumps it from the reserve beneath the patio somehow keeps going, chugging away until all the water is goes to the sewer. Little did I know. WTF, mate?