Gasping for breath…
Gah!
After the torrent of blog posts all last week, it does seem a bit strange to have utter silence for so long, no? Well, I have an excuse: Work has royally fucked me up the ass all this week.
If I’ve gotten 4 hours of sleep, total, in the past 3 days, that’s a lot. Picture it: I get into the office early on Monday morning, proud of myself for not only being on time to work, for once, but actually getting there before the boss. I start setting up, going through my email backlog, bringing up all my usual work programs and windows, starting to wind myself up for the week ahead. Then, in comes the boss: you gotta go to Client X’s, their main server didn’t come up this morning. Apparently there had been some electrical outages over the weekend, and it may have gotten stuck during one of the reboots after the UPS systems gave out. No biggie, I’ve been through this on a hundred Mondays: Someone’s server is always malfunctioning on Monday morning.
I hop in the car, head out to the client’s and check the server: uh-oh. Says it can’t locate the operating system. BIOS reports that everything’s fine, and the SCSI card claims to see all the attached drives. So it looks like the main OS drive is malfunctioning. Not a problem. Just hop on in there with my Knoppix disk, connect it to the network, spin out the data over to the backup server, make sure the Lotus user data is safe in the mirrored data drive array, replace the drive, reinstall NT4, re sync the domain, and we’re good to go. A full day’s work, to be sure, but nothing I haven’t done before a dozen times or more.
I hate Mondays.
What should have been a few hours of fairly mindless work turned into nearly 40 hours of solid brain-defying hell over the past 3 days. Nothing, and I mean nothing worked the way it was supposed to. No system backups had been made in over a year. The SCSI controller card started failing, A collection of CD drives paraded through the machine I was working on, each one in worse condition than the last, making it near impossible for me to work with Knoppix, or reinstall the OS later. The new SCSi controller card hated the floppy drive, and vice versa, which made it hard to install: the drivers for the card came on a floppy, and you needed them present and readable on the floppy to install the card, but when the card was installed, the motherboard refused to recognize the floppy. If you removed the card, the floppy worked fine, but you couldn’t install the drivers without the card ready. Catch-22 all around.
Add to that a backup domain server that decided to try and organize a coup and take over the domain, which meant that if both servers were connected at the same time, no one could connect to the network at all.. But the important company files and programs were spread between the two servers, so you needed both of them up to work properly. Sprinkle in a dash of about 60 users who took turns peeking into the server room and asking me if it was ready yet. I was ready to kill all of them within the first 5 hours.
This went on for the past 3 days. I got out after 4 am yesterday, only to have to go in again this morning. Their local techie guy was fairly clueless, but he took instructions well and did help out some, to his credit. Overall, the past 3 days tested my patience, endurance, and computer knowledge pretty much as far as it has been in any time over the past 3 years with this company. I’d still be pissed off, exhausted as I am, if it hadn’t been for one thing: the techie guy. After sticking with me and my boss for the past 3 days (although he did go home much, much earlier than we did), once the servers were finally up and about 49 salespeople immediately started reading their mail, with not a word of thanks from any of the fuckers, the guy shakes my hand and actually tells me that working with me the past 3 days has been truly impressive, that he wouldn’t have believed rescuing that server would have been possible, given how fucked it was, and that he was amazed at what I managed to accomplish. Praise from random strangers is one thing. That kinda praise from a fellow techie, however, that totally made my week.
And if it wasn’t because I have a nice long 4 day weekend coming up in just 2 days, I’d call in sick to work for the rest of the week. 
June 30th, 2005 at 11:35 am
Dude, I’ll rough them up… just say the word.
Say the word, and Lord Absu will royally fuck their shit up but GOOD.
June 30th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Hehe.. I’ll keep you on speed dial for next time.. I got a good night’s sleep last night finally, so I’m doing much better now.. and so far they haven’t called me again today, so I’m good.
June 30th, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Still… I’ll fuck up their shit.
June 30th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
I feel for you boy. I had the craziest hours this weekend (7:30 - 8:00 on Friday, if you only count work and levae out the detah in the family that had to be attended to AFTER 8….., then 8:30 AM Saturday until 3:00 AM Sunday and 11:00 AM until 5:00 on Sunday…back at work by 7:30 AM Monday….And there there are classes and salsa lessons and films…..).
I FEEL you.
kissies
June 30th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Ouchie.. At least I wasn’t the only one suffering.
BTW, call me sometime, I never see you anymore and I know your online-ness is limited. Me, I’m always around. 
July 1st, 2005 at 8:17 am
I am never online anymore, exceot at work, and teh corporate lines ahve been down all overv UPR for days. now they are msotly back. I pln to buy a new box BTW, so now is your chance to try and “advise2 me on what I should/should NOT buy. And try to sell me on that whole “build from scrath model2 of computer buying…
M
July 1st, 2005 at 9:16 am
Wow… that paragraph made me want to cry. My inner spelling nazi rages and froths.
Anyway, call me over the long 4 day weekend and we’ll sit down and see what you should buy. I’ve got a copy of my supplier’s price list, so we can work out how much it might cost to build one from scratch vs. buying a Dell @ CompUSA. Just as a quick comparison, I can get you a 2.8Ghz Pentium-4 PC with an 80GB hard disk, 512 MB of RAM, and all accesories (mouse, modem, LAN, keyboard, speakers, CD-writer/DVD reader, and Windows XP (legal, even)), plus a 17″ monitor, for around $695. 1 year warranty on the computer and pieces, 3 years on the monitor. If’n you were to want a video card with some actual oomph to it, we could work that out too.
It’s that or a Dell, basicaly.
July 1st, 2005 at 10:46 pm
Dude, while you’re shooting the shit with Monster…
…I could be busting up foo’s with extreme prejudice.
…
FYI.
July 2nd, 2005 at 8:01 am
Dude, but who is going to actually puit the pieces together? And fix it when it all goes awry? You will be working…..’sides I have to work this weekend. (That’s why I canm read this message).
BTW, I know the spelling is awful, but you try to type fast with studnets and boss hovering and work to be done, plus my inimitable typing fingers….
July 2nd, 2005 at 12:19 pm
The pices all come together, if you’re talking about the machine I described above. Our supplier sells pre-assembled machines for that price, in addition to just spare parts. As for fixing it if it breaks, I can always drop on by in the afternoon once I get off work to check it out, and if a piece needs to be replaced, it’ll usually be just a da or two for me to drop by the supplier with the piece and call in the warranty. Not that much different from anywhere else where you’d have to take your computer somewhere for them to get it fixed. Plus, I generally don’t charge friends for tech support, although I will grumble and insult your lack of l33tness.
July 2nd, 2005 at 4:30 pm
Ahora sí estamos hablando cabrón. Si viene montá y tú hasta alegas que me la chequeas cuando se rompa (if you lie I kick your ass) entonces entiendo que esa es la máquina que procede.
Necesito saber cuántos USB ports me van a poner (y que me pongan por al frente coño) y par de cosas más. ¿Cuan indecente y obsceno sería que me cotizaran un maldito monitos plano? Y no me digas que son caros, que eso ya lo sé. Pero yo soy nena y soy linda y me gustan los monitores planos.
Anyway, yo te llamo, no, no tellamo na’ porque no tengo el número nuevo del maldito celular así que…TU, (sí tú mismo, el del gorro en la cabeza) me tienes que llamar y yo hasta te compro una computadora….
kisses