I was completely satisfied.

Almost.

It was still annoying, the way the content on my monitors would switch when moving from work to home and vice versa. But beyond that, I was happy. I had E/Port docks in both places, and E/Port was compatible with both work and personal laptops. And I had purchased the same monitors for at home that I had at work. All good!

And then the case of my work laptop started having a gap in the front, and I had a bad feeling. I unscrewed the case and sure enough, the battery was bulging.

Friends, this is bad news. This is the kind of problem that can set things on fire.

So I  hauled it in to work on my day off to get the battery replaced. Only they don’t get batteries for that model anymore, so that means issuing a whole other laptop.

No worries. I’m always ready for that. And when you work in The Cloud, whatever is on your physical machine is pretty moot, right?

Except they handed me a new dock, too. Looked like a brick. I would find out that this is a Thunderbolt dock, and the new work laptop had zero compatibility with the E/Port.

Further, my personal, privately owned computer would have no compatibility with the second Thunderbolt dock they gave me for working from home.

As of this minute, at home, I have two completely separate docks plugged in. Each has its own pair of cables to the two monitors. Each is plugged into my finite power capacity. And I am manually moving the USB dongles for mouse and keyboard from one to the other.

And I have an order in for tomorrow for a universal docking station because I am not cool with this. How relieved to discover that universal docking stations even exist. I made sure this one has the connections I need for the monitors I have, because a lot don’t.

Fingers crossed.