I don’t know who, for sure, but somebody loves me enough to send me a random box, tied up with very nice dark-green ribbon…
… with lots of nifty stuff inside!
Let’s see: Honey sticks, six flavors of herbal tea, cookies, a pair of glasses, and a note! Awwwwwww!
(Note: Pictures were taken with my Treo 600 instead of my Canon, ‘cause I didn’t bring my bag to work. Oops. Sorry.)
Just to let me know he’s still alive, my friend Ben sent me a picture of a warning sign I wish I had a few copies of. Can we make that into stickers, please?
The beeping started at a bit after 2:30 this morning.
“Logger 2 is DOWN!” read the message on my phone.
“Okay,” I said, and crawled back into bed.
Three minutes later, “Logger 2 is UP!”
“Great,” I said, and crawled back into bed.
Thus began an ordeal that continued until, oddly enough, just about the time I left for work. Every twenty to forty minutes, I’d get a false alarm on either Logger 1 or 2. As you might imagine, after a couple of hours I was losing patience, not to mention any chance at a restful night’s sleep. And in case you’re thinking, “Why didn’t you just turn off the phone?” all I can say is, “And that’d be the exact moment that a real emergency reared its head, and if nobody can reach me during one of those then my head could roll.”
I found the problem, though it wasn’t (specifically) with the Logger computers themselves. Oh, no. It was Servers Alive, which I’d reinstalled recently. The detection timeouts for Loggers 1 and 2 were set to 5 seconds, while Logger 3’s was set to 20 seconds. No wonder I never got a false alarm for #3, eh? What’s more, for some reason Servers Alive had reverted to a check schedule of every three minutes during off-peak weekday hours! Hello? Overkill much? Even worse, the weekend on- and off-peak check intervals were set to every single minute. Ouch.
The timeouts are now set correctly, as are the check intervals. The fixes come too late to get my lost night of sleep back, but at least if my phone beeps at me tonight it probably won’t be a false alarm… I hope.
I’ve called the USPS twice, each of the two mornings this work week. I’ve been assured that my problem “is being worked on” and I should expect a call back some time today. If I don’t hear from them, I get to call again tomorrow and really start pushing.
I need this resolved, ASAP, dammit.
Oh, yeah, and WaMu, in their efforts to be helpful and cancel my returned card for the sake of security, turned off my existing card as well. So I’m cardless, several days earlier than anticipated. Argh.
Let me lead off this entry by saying that I love Washington Mutual. I can send them a message via their website on a Saturday and get a reply that same day… and a reply to my reply on a Sunday. Nevermind the mess of a situation I’m in, that’s the kind of customer service I like.
That said, I’m screwed. Turns out that for the last month or so, mail sent to my home has been getting returned as if I don’t live there. First the property managers say that I don’t live there, now this? Is someone trying to tell me something? Considering that WaMu sent my replacement card back in May, that tells you how long this problem has been going on. Mind you, due to my general lack of paying attention lately (see previous entry), I didn’t even realize this until yesterday. So in the end, I’m the dumbass. (Like that surprises anybody, right?)
The bank says, “update your address and we’ll mail you out a new card.” Great, except that the address on file is my address. Do I need to move just to get a new card? The postal service, of course, isn’t exactly a font of information on the best of days, let alone a weekend, so I have no idea what’s really going on at their end. Did someone put in an address change of some sort, or is our mail carrier just utterly confused? How much mail have I missed? What sort of important things (besides my replacement card) have bounced back to sender? Last but certainly not least, what the hell can I do about it?
Go back to using checks for everything? Oh, but wait, those all have my old address on them, too… maybe I should have the bank mail me new ones. Heh.
