“Karel, our printer’s doing something weird.”

Oh, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that in my eight years here. Luckily, the guy who came to my door in this instance is one of those who isn’t prone to panicking over trivialities, so I dutifully followed him over to his workspace.

Hmm. The printer was spitting out solid black sheets of paper, edge to edge and top to bottom. I unplugged the print server and the printer itself to stem the black tide, and made an intuitive leap that the toner cartridge might have been damaged in some fashion.

While I was unplugging things, I noticed a nearly-empty coffee cup, with a lipstick stain on the rim, next to the printer. I frowned a bit at this, but paid it no more mind.

The obvious solution appeared to be, “replace the toner cart.” So I popped open the case, briefly noted the coffee stain on the inside of the chassis, frowned again, and reached for the cartridge.

Now, you don’t ordinarily reach into a printer and expect to pull away a wet hand, but that’s precisely what happened. Yes, folks, somebody managed to spill coffee deep inside the machine, enough to form puddles on the toner cart, and that’s why it’s incapable of printing correctly.

Gee. I wonder if this has anything to do with that lipstick-smeared nearly-empty cup of coffee. What do you think?

Pop quiz: What’s wrong with the following login screen for Tapscan?

If you answered, “The down-scroll arrow is dangerously close to the Delete User button,” you should apply to work at Arbitron, because clearly nobody there thinks that this is a problem. Nor, apparently, is it a problem that the “Delete” button does not pop up an “Are you sure?” dialog of any kind. Nope. When “Delete” is clicked, whoever is highlighted gets deleted, immediately, and so do all of their saved settings and schedules. Poof. Gone. No questions asked.

I mention this only because I’ve had to restore individual user accounts twice in as many weeks, all because someone wasn’t exactingly cautious where they clicked when they went to scroll down through the list of users. Argh. (Please note that I do not blame the people doing the clicking. This is a stupid, stupid user-interface flaw. Stupid, I say.)

While I try to stumble and slide my way through this long, long Friday, one particular round of one-liner emails managed to put a smile on my face. I’ll paraphrase thusly, with artistic embellishments:

VIP, else-company, to Local VIP and My-Own-Self: You and you, please see to it that something is taken care of in some market somewhere. I’m asking you because you two are tangentally involved with the system in question.

Local VIP, to Otherwhere VIP, cc’d to Yours Truly: That has to be taken care of by someone at the market in question. I’ve taken the liberty of communicating your desires to the appropriate party. Have a nice day.

Duckling, to On-Top-Of-Things: Praise you. Had I gotten to that email before you did, I’d have said some distinctly impolitic things, because, I mean, what the hell? No information to go on, just “make it so”? Captain Picard he ain’t.

Capable One, to Groggy Waterfowl: What, you mean you can’t read minds? I have a great how-to book to sell you, in that case.

Snarky Quacker, to Purveyor Of Mystic Lore: Any number of women in my acquaintance would praise your name if you had such a book for me to learn from. *laughter*

Snake-Oil Saleswoman, to Hopeful Sucker: And I’d be rich!!! *bigger laughter*

Okay, actually those last three exchanges are nearly verbatim. The earlier ones are quite a bit modified from the original.

Some days, I really love my job simply because it amuses me.

It took me a solid week, minus the weekend I wasn’t allowed to work. There were major and minor hitches along the way. But as of a few short minutes ago, I’m done with the old machine, having migrated the last account.

The email server’s dead. Long live the email server.

I’ve been dealing with almost nothing but email for the last month or so, and it’s taken up at least half of my working time for the last year. I still have one bit of work to do (setting up quotas) but after that I can actually… gods forbid… concentrate on other parts of my job! I know, it’s almost too radical a concept to grasp. Wow.

Now all I need to do is wait 45 minutes for the next bus out of here…

I have a wonderful system in place to graph my various server stats as well as alert me when certain boundaries are being crossed. For instance, if one of the two storage drives in any one of our three audio loggers gets full past a certain point, I get an email about it.

It’s set to email me every half hour, so it’s a little bit hard to ignore.

I started getting email about Logger 1 towards midnight on Friday. At the time I was out in Beaverton and disinclined to do much of anything about it. Then, last night, I started getting email about Logger 3 as well, and it didn’t take a genius (which I’m not anyway) to figure out that if either of those two loggers went down before I could make it to work Monday, there’d be all kinds of hell toupee. Er, to pay.

So here I am, paying a visit to the office so I can delete out files that the iMediaLogger software is supposed to be doing automatically. Argh. (To fix the problem, says software maker OMT, requires upgrading to a new version… that won’t run on our hardware. Great!)

Here’s hoping your weekend’s more relaxing than mine, friends.

I’ve moved 30 or so out of 210 email accounts from the old server to the new. You’d think, especially considering I’ve already moved my “top ten” heavyweight accounts, that the drive usage on the old server would, you know, go down a bit?

Apparently you’d be wrong. I’m not sure what’s keeping all that space in use, but I’m now in as much of a race against time as I was when I got the new server to begin with.

It looks like I’ll be working this weekend after all…