Now, I adore our front desk crew. They’re hardworking, patient, smart and funny ladies. Every now and then, though, they run into trouble with operating their computers…

*ring, ring*

“Yes?”

“My computer’s being funny.”

“Okay.”

“I can’t open email without it also opening MSN, and it won’t let me put in my password.”

“Right. Be right there.”

*walk to lobby, observe state of the desk in question, slide stack of books and paperwork three inches to the south*

“There you go.”

“Huh? What?”

“You had stuff sitting on your keyboard.”

*sounds of astonishment*

I love my job. I wish all of my support calls were so simple to resolve!

Here’s a hot tip, guys:

If you want to avoid making yourself and indeed the entire company look incompetent, why don’t you try making sure you get the new hire’s name right so that their network, email, and software logins don’t all consist of something they’ll find it unnatural to type?

Yours, etc,
The Guy Who Creates All Those Logins.

ps, Thank you.

(Note that I address this to “guys”. I have yet to see one of the female managers bungle a new hire’s name spelling. I have yet to see a male manager, however, who hasn’t botched at least two of these cases. I am not kidding.)

So after more than 24 hours of weirdness with the email server, including an install of the Netware service pack, several phone calls to Corporate IT, running around the building poking and prodding at various computers, running a packet capture on the server to analyze its traffic…

Nothing worked. The problem simply refused to go away.

So I gave up. I threw my hands in the air and walked away from the problem, muttering loudly to nobody in particular, and worked on some entirely unrelated problems I’d been putting off for the sake of the email emergency.

When I got back to my office an hour or so later… the email server was working perfectly. Oh, great. Now I don’t know what broke or what fixed the breakage. I get to live in fear of this happening again and my coworkers insisting I do whatever I did “last time you fixed it.”

I suppose I should just be glad it’s working again so I can leave and try to enjoy my weekend, right?

Right?

I survived the UPS repair ordeal. So what happens on my first full day back on the job?

The email server goes insane.

Right now it’s operating on one (intermittent) TCP/IP thread (out of ten… and that’s up from the eight it was configured for previously… it’s the only suggestion I was able to glean from a couple hours’ worth of Novell support and Google trawling) and thus running as slow as a snail on quaaludes.

And of course, it’s after 5pm Eastern time so Corporate IT has already gone home. Whee.

I just love an insoluble problem and a complete lack of support. You bet your sweet, sweet bippy.

UPDATE: Corporate returned my call after all. Apparently there’s a service pack for Netware 5.1 that may solve my dilemma. Now to download and install it… after hours. Talk about your mixed blessings… and that’s if this actually solves the problem. Whee.

If all goes well, this website (among a few others as well) will vanish from the Internet for a short while, shortly after midnight.

If all goes well, the UPS will become fully operational with its new logic board and a whole truckload of batteries. (I’ve seen the truck.)

If all goes well, I’ll probably be home around 3am. I hope nobody minds if I come in a wee bit late tomorrow… (Too bad I can’t take the whole day. Bah.)

UPDATE, 9:30am the next day: We had a false start, but other than that things went pretty well. Nothing seems to be the worse for wear, probably due to our actually getting to shut things down cleanly. Huzzah. Let’s now pray that the UPS doesn’t bother us for at least another year…