You know it’s a bad workday when your entire day consists of one mysterious, pervasive problem that even the product’s tech support gurus find baffling.

Our Cybex system seems to have gone to lunch in a remarkable and confounding fashion. Users on a chassis can’t see any other chassis. Mouse and keyboard response are sluggish on some user stations. User stations blank out randomly, for minutes at a time. (This is a Very Bad Thing when the user station in question is, let’s say, the digital audio workstation for a given broadcast studio. Argh.) The diagnostic tools return random results. I’ve sent diagrams and spreadsheets to Avocent, and the reply I got back amounts to, “Damn, we’re stumped, but we’re working on it. We’ll call when we have something.”

Meanwhile I’m tinkering and poking and fiddling, sending notes along to Avocent as I go, and basically hoping for that 4-o’clock miracle to save me from having to do this all again tomorrow.

I love my job. I love my job. I love my job…

So let’s go through the rundown of today’s annoyances, just for kicks:

• The copy of Napster on one of the FM studio computers. Argh.
• The copy of Limewire on one of morning show hosts’ computers. Double argh.
• The complete inability of an out-of-office client to follow very, very simple instructions. “Click this link. Click this next link. See files? Good.” Apparently the second step is beyond their ken. Triple argh.
• The utter discombobulation of the print system on one particular computer, to the point where the only way I’m going to get it printing again is to throw it on the bench first thing tomorrow for a nuke-and-repave job. Extra quadruple argh with a cherry on top. And I don’t like cherries.
• People who use other people as a buffer for tech support calls. Hi, I’m not an ogre, and I really appreciate not having to go through an extra layer of communication when there’s a problem that needs fixing, so stop having other people make your damned support calls, okay? Argh quintuplets.
• Impossible and/or conflicting mandates from management. Argh, argh, argh, argh, argh and goddamned argh.

And this is one of the better tech jobs available. Maybe I really am in the wrong line of work…

Good: Approval for new email server

Bad: Waiting about two more weeks for new email server and hoping that the current server doesn’t collapse under its own weight in the meantime

Good: Upgrading the sound card in one of the prep rooms

Bad: Suddenly losing one channel of audio in and out of the machine (has nothing to do with the card, as swapping left/right on the breakout box for the card produces the expected result), leaving me bewildered and out of ideas

Good: Mandatory off-site meeting from 3pm to closing time

Bad: Mandatory off-site meeting… well, you get the idea

First there was the “msgina.dll” error, but I didn’t see that. No, what really made my jaw drop was this one:

“The file or directory C: is invalid.”

That’s never a good sign, is it?

Yeah, I spent almost all day rebuilding one of the transmitter remote-control computers. Turns out the motherboard was fritzed, though it gave errors that led me to believe it was a partition or drive failure at first. Ah well. It could’ve been worse, I suppose.

Still, I’m glad it’s the weekend. Very, very glad.