I don’t recall ever using mothballs. These were small lumps of material that would sublimate over time and give off fumes poisonous to moths and other fibre-eating pests. The fumes weren’t great for humans either and, with most people’s wardrobes containing fewer natural fibre garments, mothballs are rarely necessary. However, the name has become synonymous with the idea of closing a project or putting it to bed for an extended time.

Today we’ve been “mothballing” the Windows 11 deployment office run by IT services at the University. The project, which has been the main area I’ve worked on over the last year, is moving on to upgrading desktop machines in situ. There are still some laptops out there which need upgrading but those will now be done on a “business as usual” basis via the main helpdesk.

It does feel a bit sad to have reached the end of this phase as I’d got quite used to the routine. There are plenty of little systems I’d worked up to help things run smoothly, like the process of maintaining a text file that told me who to expect each day and gave me a map of where to find the machines for each person coming back to collect their upgraded laptop. Still, it has given me a chance to keep my Vim skills up to date and even develop a few new ones (like macros for routine batch tasks). I’ve also found scope for a bit of Python programming, for example a script I run each morning to flag pending collections as due and collections that were missed as overdue.

Some of those particular things won’t get used again but at least I can carry the skills forward. I expect it won’t be long before I find another situation where my little box of software tools will find some new opportunities for use.