24: Tagging Jail

Luke Oliver

22 Jul 2025 • 3 min read

This is an absolute throwback photo to my High School wood shop class, wherein we made a few of the laser-cut dinosaurs on display. One of the ones in the photo is mine, and is still in my room at home. One of the dinos in this photo is in "dino jail", which was created from some laser scrap.

The interns have made it a thing to call whatever work we get assigned "___ jail", and since today I was doing primarily tagging, I was put in "tagging jail". Referring to the time as "jail" isn't really derogatory, but it does imply a repetitiveness and length to the job. This job does definitely have both length and repetitiveness, but it isn't fully mindless, it's like a really bad version of Flow, the old mobile game (OGs know what I'm talking about). I think I may have explained some of this in yesterday's post, but tagging is the job of assigning labels to important items on the floor plans and then making it so all of the labels are legible, not interfering with one another, and not covering any important actual hardware. In my case, it's all mechanical stuff, TS tanks and CDUs, (I have no idea what a TS tank is, but CDU is Coolant Distribution Unit, this is cooling stuff). The problem is that these things are all in the "Cooling Gallery", which is a long, thin corridor that circumscribes the data hall (where the servers live). This corridor is packed with stuff, so I'm juggling four or five different sets of tags along a hallway, and I've had to pull up every tetris and organizational trick in the book to get them all labelled in a way that is both sensible and presentable. I am fully under NDA on specifics, so as much as I wish I could show what exactly this looks like, I cannot. I got through almost all of the tagging today, with some help from Raymond, my partner in crime (though he was in pipes jail most of today), but it still isn't quite done. Of the 8 sections, we've fully labelled and organized 6, which is pretty good. The problem is that this needs to be done by (end of day) Thursday, but Raymond and I are both completely out tomorrow on a factory tour with one of our suppliers. I have faith that we'll be able to get it done Thursday morning, but I do feel a little bad for abandoning Bush (MechE that we've been working with), because when I talked to him as I was leaving today it was clear he didn't know Raymond and I were going to be gone 😥.