I’m calling the fire marshall 
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Might need sunscreen to sit in front of that…
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Oh, I identify with that. The long table in the picture I posted has been my desk/workbench in various forms for about 37 years now. It’s a solid core door, and the rear shelf is a 1-foot cut of another, both the shelf and its supports. They’re so heavy and dimensional that I just stack them up like you see, no screws, bolts, or other adhesive. It started life sitting on a couple of filing cabinets and a makeshift wood frame support wedged in the back up against the wall. For the current office/shop, I splurged and bought a couple of steel table end legs.
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My first modem was a 300-baud headset cradle thing, don’t remember the brand, bought it at a hamfest in Florida. There, I used it to connect to the school computer to do my master’s programming with my S-100 bus Z-80 CP/M homebrew box, any of you remember those?
My funny modem story goes like this: Working on a group project for school, one of the folk had a Kaypro luggable with an internal modem. One Saturday I go to the other fellow’s apartment for a programming session, and he’s lamenting the unknown malady of his parrot. The bird is sitting on his perch, making odd squeaking noises. The Kaypro fellow shows up, and we get to work… he boots up the computer, starts the modem connection to the school, and as we listen to the eeek-aaawk of the modem exchange it occurs to us what screwed up the parrot…
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Not quite a Kaypro, but I used a Compaq Plus for quite a while at work. Same luggable form factor and very tough. We would fly and it would go as luggage, with nothing more than a thick, soft vinyl slip cover. It had been upgraded to 640K, a 10 MB hard drive and a CGA adapter (with a composite video output as well).
So did he rename his parrot “Baudot”?
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My desk doesn’t have that kind of history - but it is custom made.
The legs and frame are cut down timber originating in a pallet frame, while the top is just a piece of 3-ply plywood. Rudimentary but serviceable.
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I used to work for Ma Bell. I worked in a data center. I remember a row of a hundred or more 300 baud modems (all connected with handsets) that the people in our nine states connected to my mainframe systems with. They were behind a steel mesh cage, and only actual telephone workers could physically access them. On the one hand, I was a little butt hurt that they had so little trust in us, but on the other hand, at least they couldn’t accuse us if anything went wrong with the modems.
And yeah, parrots are masters at imitating noises. I used to have an African Gray parrot. It could make us think the microwave oven was alarming us. It could sound exactly like my wife calling my son. But my favorite thing was, when I was starting to wake up in the morning, listening to it imitate all of the outside yard birds. Over and over, like a tape player looping.
I told my wife about your solid core doors as desks and work tables. She really likes the idea.
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Oh, kinda reminds me of the rotary telephone exchange at the Eastern Test Range (Cape Canaveral) when I was there in the early ‘80s. Row upon row of racks containing the cascade array of relays needed to decode rotary dials on folks’ phones, a clattering cacophony. It was replaced during my assignment…
The place was littered with little anachronisms. The range safety folk were still using ForTRAN, punch cards, and an IBM 1400-series computer to do their trajectory analysis, one of those “pry from my cold, dead hands” situations. When we switched from “get with the future” arguments to “look how convenient”, they eventually came around to remote terminals to the mainframe…
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Better not too much in this case. This is not a dedicated office or a work place, but basically my living room. And having a mess there would be a bit uncomfortable. But I promise I have some messes too at home.
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My workplace, in an old part of the house. I run a little printing business, the big printer is an Epson SureColor.
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…as I read your post:
This is Lulu, who joined us in the autumn of 2019 from a neighbor who was moving. She’s becoming a real sweetheart. There are two others, but between us and my daughter (who lived with us for a while), there were at one point six of 'em… (far too many).
Anyway, she’s my assistant for the time being.
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This one moved from my neighbor’s house to ours and has not wanted to leave, the neighbor gave it to us and now she is the real owner of the house, we have two others but in my wife’s house.
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Yeah… Trip and Albert (the other two) are affectionate and great cats, but Lulu is making great progress. When the next-door neighbor made it clear he was more than willing to let her go (i.e., “I’m not spending a dime on that cat”, etc.), she made the transition to us quite easily. She had already spent a lot of time around our house anyway. If she didn’t make it back to his apartment before he locked up at night, she slept in our garage (I made a heated box for her when winter came on).
She’s always been friendly, tolerant and interested in being around us. But after a couple of years of deliberately light-handed (but persistent) attention / affection from me in particular, she’s coming out of her shell, getting more and more intentionally affectionate. If she becomes a real lap cat, we’ll probably have to write her into our will. She already has us wrapped around her little claw…
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Dogs have masters,
cats have servants
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Godwin’s Second Law: As an internet thread grows longer, the probability of cats approaches one. Reductio ad feles
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