The workday wasn’t too terrible, and in fact I accomplished a number of nifty things. A not-so-nifty chore I wasn’t looking forward to, though, was setting up our Office Manager on a new network arrangement that includes an HP print server (since she now has to share her printer with her new cubemate). Traditionally the job of making HP JetDirect servers talk to Netware fileservers has been the stuff of ulcers.

I didn’t have much choice this time, though, so I went ahead and ran the installer off of the CD-ROM, figuring that in the worst case scenario I’d at least be able to find out what IP address the print server had taken, even if no other part of the install worked as advertised.

Not only did it work — the first time — but it did so with almost no required input from Yours Truly. I’m not kidding. The only thing I changed was the print queue name (to something slightly less cryptic, given the way XP names network printers… argh). The test page printed. Installing the new print queue on the end-user computer was also flawlessly smooth.

So, uh, who let the flying pigs out? ‘Cause this is freaky, man.

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.