This week has been exhausting.

I focused on money-making projects this week. I feel like I head to the HFC “till” way too often, especially for staff salaries, security and expenses of the center. It’s costing us way too much money to run the training center, especially since The Keep is making no money whatsoever.

I’ve been running 12 and 15 hour days lately. I spent the majority of that time repairing laptops. Fred and I made like $80 fixing machines, all of which belonged to mzungus here in town. It seems there just aren’t many trustworthy, competent and inexpensive computer repair shops in this town, and it’s a niche we can fill. No one will touch a Mac other than a single repair shop in Kampala, which charges a literal fortune to work on a Mac (or so I hear). So we repaired about five laptops this week. Two were Windows machines that had “slowed down”. After a ton of searching, I found Glarys Utilities which was the only free tool I could find to properly clean out Windows gunk. We also ripped out Kaspersky, which had lost its battle with the African virus scene, and replaced it with AVG. Another machine was a brand-new super-sweet VAIO that had completely lost its mind and it’s hard drive. The owner had a new drive Fed-Exed and we rebuilt the machine. The Sony drivers took forever to download and cost us two bucks in bandwidth. I know this because I did the math and discovered that it costs us 13.33 shillings per megabyte to download stuff with our 3G connection. What a weird existence to even consider measuring such things.

The Mac repairs came as a surprise, and I think that will be a niche for us also. The one MacBook had slowed to a crawl. Nothing would run, but activity monitor showed normal everything. I dug around for my TechTools CD, but I think I left it in the US somewhere in storage. I tried to download the free version from Apple, but my AppleCare has expired. Feh. That left with really no choice. I headed for a torrent and pulled down the non-bootable version, which was decidedly smaller. I did every test I could via target mode from my laptop, and ran what I could from the actual machine, and everything came back green. (What I wouldn’t give for a bootable Mac diagnostic suite).

I Archived and Installed but at the last minute the machine hung. Something in the User profile creation hung and I had to enable root and copy all the stuff by hand after a reboot. A real mess, but the laptop survived, as did the user files, and no more beach ball.

I killed myself for a couple days for this eighty bucks because it pays a month’s salary for one of our employees in the center. I hope to get others on staff doing repair work full time so I can concentrate on other things. Like marketing.

This week I drafted some sales and marketing material and also some service contract templates. We have a really sweet NComputing solution that can save NGO’s a ton of cash. I hope to sell the solution. A single sale can save an NGO half on hardware costs and also float a staff member for five months. Five Months. As for service contracts, if we can get NGO’s on board, a service contract for repair, checkups, maintenance and updates can provide a valuable service and give us steady work that doesn’t fully rely on (the really tough) stream of one-off repairs. One service contract could fund an average of two employees for a month.

I know that on the scale of things it seems really odd to be knocking myself out for a couple hundred bucks. On my salary in the US I could easily have funded 20 Ugandan techs a month without really even missing the money. I know I could just write my check for $800 (yup, salary for 20 techs) and let someone else deal with the headaches.

(And there ARE so many headaches. This week we found out that one of our most trusted employees was caught in a web of lies that can’t be explained away. This employee walked away from his or her job and then the ugliness started to come to light. I caught real flack for letting him or her walk away. I extended him or her undeserved Grace–you know like the kind God grants us– and didn’t put Himorher in jail, which would have been justified. It was the real low point of our trip here. And there’s my patented paragraph in parenthesis).

If the speaking gigs hit, I could really do a lot more, but the only talk I have is what I’m doing here, and still it’s hard to point to the success. And talks without a happy ending don’t really carry well. (Unless you’re at DEFCON. Then, the talks with the most unhappy endings are the best.=)

But for whatever reason, I am here slogging away at this, and on those days when I slip ten bucks in my pocket because I fixed a laptop, and I have made a happy customer, I feel really blessed, and one of my guys gets paid for four more days. And it feels right, somehow.

I do need to get my life in balance because I’m spending zero quality time with my family, though. That is a Problem.

It’s two A.M.

It’s an 18-hour day, thanks to Live Music Night at The Keep.

Goodnight.