I decided to sign onto Neopets this morning and feed my famished pet. While I was there I did the usual rounds, including the Tombola. For the first time in ages I actually won something nifty from it.
And when I saw my prize I started singing the Bottle Fairy theme song… because I acquired a “Bottled Air Faerie.” I’m pretty sure it’s Kururu, on account of it being a blue bottle…
(Yes, I’m a big ol’ geek. Your point?)
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?
Via The People’s Republic of Seabrook, this cute bit of fluff:
My life is rated PG-13.
What is your life rated?
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…
I plead unease of the intestinal tract and equilibrium. See, I fought mild-to-worrisome nausea levels all day yesterday. (Bless my friends for putting up with my whiney-butt self all day. Bah.)
The kids arrived home from Arizona yesterday evening. As Wendi had a gig, I became the designated (quicker?) picker upper. I was dropped off at the airport, still concentrating on keeping my insides in, and made my way to the ticket counter to get my “parents pass” (for lack of a better phrase).
See, there are only three types of people allowed through the security checkpoint: Employees of the airport or an airline, ticketed passengers, and parents seeing off their children or picking them up. And that’s only one parent, not both, as we learned when we sent the kids off a month ago. So I got my pass and proceeded to the checkpoint.
The contents of my pockets: Loose change, keys, more keys, wallet, and… oops. My Leatherman Micra.
See, because I wasn’t actually flying anywhere, I didn’t give a second thought to the contents of my pockets. (Not that day, anyway. I’d thought about it the day before. Just not enough to actually take the Micra out of my pocket. Duh.) Had I been traveling I’d have been extra-careful about what I tried to get through the checkpoint. Really.
So the very polite, if not terribly friendly, TSA folks confiscated my Micra and provided a mini-lecture. Thanks, guys.
I did, mind you, get it back after the kids had arrived. But there are two amusing parts to this story:
1) Not one hundred feet from where my Micra sat in the TSA “office” drawer I saw an ad for… Leatherman. I couldn’t help but think, “Does this make sense? Advertising for sharp objects on an airport concourse, right near the security checkpoint?”
2) The ever-so-watchful TSA folks who spotted and snagged my Micra totally failed to notice that my “keychain” consists of an old, small pocketknife…
