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…