Or, “You can’t deduplicate your house but when you move you wish to hell you could”.
Building a house is an emotionally and physically exhausting process. The building industry has heard of this thing called “timetabling”, and wants no truck with it. Instead, the entire process is run with a fervently lackadaisical approach. But, you end up with all the power points you need because you get to add them into the plan.
Moving is an emotionally and physically exhausting process, and that’s with outsourcing a lot of the work. The last time I fully moved myself was in my mid-20s. After that, it was always a case of hiring professionals to at least do the transport, leaving my husband and I just with the packing and unpacking. No, wait, I tell a lie: in my 40s we moved ourselves (and roped some friends into it, repaid with the requisite beer, wine, pizza, swearing, sweating, and back-ache). That involved having the house we were renting sold and the same day the house almost directly across the road from us go up for rent. “How hard can it be to move just across the street?” (Spoiler: It’s nuts. Don’t do it. Still hire people.)
When you’re an IT professional, there’s a certain point in the move preparation you’re dreading: packing up the home lab. Four Synology servers, three switches, two tower servers, seven small form factor PCs, monitors and monitors and monitors (someone throw me a bone here and recommend a decent IP-addressable KVM that doesn’t cost more than a modern server), keyboards of all shapes and sizes (see previous point), and cables.
People joke about their precious cable boxes, but seriously, I’m most concerned about the profligate mating practices of cables when they’re out of sight. Between the three switches in the house I only have 64 network ports accessible and I swear to Cthulhu that I must have bundled up at least 900 network cables that had spawned behind the equipment shelving.
Second thoughts but too late now: I’ve kept every hard-drive that failed for the past 13+ years, intending that should we ever end up in our own place I’d pull the platters out, get a mounting board constructed (dreaming of Mulga wood, but not sure if that’s an option), and put all the platters on it. Did I have any idea how heavy that many hard-drives would be? No, no I did not. Now that I’ve got all those hard-drives pulled together, do I think I have the patience to extract their platters? Well, there’s a reason I don’t do jigsaws, or knit. (Actually, the reason I don’t knit is RSI, but I like to pretend it’s partly to do with a lack of patience.)
When you move you wish you could deduplicate your life. At least for the transfer process.
There will be at least one deduplication attempt: trying to vacuum compress a memory foam mattress. Memory foam mattresses may be a delight to sleep on, but when it comes to moving them, they’re like a giant cat that doesn’t want to get picked up. A very heavy giant cat. A very heavy, very rectangular giant cat. That you need to carry down a flight of stairs.
But at least I’ll have all the power points I need. At least until I start plugging things in.