Blowing the cerebral head gasket
So I saunter into work on wednesday morning full of my usual optimism. That is to say, I was sure the day would end in disaster. I generally expect disaster and I am rarely disappointed. I knew something was up when I saw a coworker who gave us smoking standing outside smoking furiously.
My coworker must have seen me coming because she ducks back inside before I can say anything and so I have to wait until she reappears to be greeted with this little gem.
"The computer's not working."
Four little words with a multitude of meanings in the world of offices. It can mean anything from "the colors look different" all the way out to "the computers have grown legs, joined a labor union, and are picketing us." The computer was sitting on my desk humming smugly so I didn't have to fear the latter end of the spectrum. So I must engage step two in the ritual exchange.
"Not working how?"
It turns out they are working just fine. They boot normally, they log in normally. I can access email, the Internet, and normal desktop applications. All I can't do is access one measly little website. That's all. Just one little website . . . that hosts the application that is the focus for 98% of my job. Oh for crying out loud.
Well, we follow procedure, such as it is, and call the No Help Whatsoever We Pity The Fool Who Calls Us Desk and they told us we were wrong. I'm serious. They said, "We don't see a network outage" and then they hung up. Apparently they thought that we had put a little too much peyote in our coffee and we were hallucinating the screen saying it was an invalid host. To add insult to injury, we found people in other sites actually were connecting just fine. As we got more reports, we discovered that it was not just us, though. Everyone in my sub business had the same problem.
So, when the Lead comes in she gives me the name of someone up on high that I can escalate the problem to as I was getting dismissed down low. I send a message to him . . . and he relays it to someone down low. The script jockeys at the utterly Helpless Desk call me up, have me setup Netmeeting so they can have remote access to my computer . . . and they delete my cookies and my cache. Apparently my computer was taking down the whole network.
Well, to their shock, that doesn't do anything. So they give up. After much complaining two script jockeys contact me later and engage me in a three way chat where two of them are suggesting that I delete my cookies. After that meets with scorn on my part, they then try to convince me that I really don't need to access that site.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
After wasting 3 hours where I am telling them I really do need access to this, they pass the buck to someone else. I call the someone else, he passes it to the site we are trying to access and places a call to them and is consequentially ignored.
This was my day Wednesday. Thursday wasn't any better. Last night, just before I left for the evening, they had elevated the problem to "level 2." Apparently this is the point where they pry the problem out of the hands of the little script monkeys and hand it over to people who have some clue as to what the computers do. This morning, the problem gets fixed.
In sending the me notice that it was fixed, they attached the letter where one of the systems people was informing the help desk in India, who had thus far managed to wrestle defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory, where the problem originated. Apparently my location, which is the headquarters of our sub business, had three dedicated connections to the Internet. "Had" is the appropriate verb because one of them was being phased out over the course of a year. All traffic was now on the two main lines and apparently someone figured it was time to yank the third "useless" pipe . . . a pipe which apparently only carried traffic to one lone website that someone had locked the setting in so it HAD to use that particular connection.
So, for two days I had people in India trying desperately to convince me that I didn't need to use this site rather than fix it before it got to someone who said "Hey! What major changes happened to the network round about that time?" You know, if that was the worst of it, it would have left me with a bad day today . . . but the story gets better.
Yesterday was the first day of a co-worker's week long vacation. Good for her, but she is the person who does almost all the administrative/clerical functions of the office. Almost all, because they trained the new guy on how to cover for her on her days off. And the new guy is . . . ah crap. That's me, right?
Not only am I two days behind on my own work, I am also two days behind on someone else's job as well. All day I was buzzing through task after task. Answering phone calls and emails here, looking up information there, stuffing envelopes over there, making calls over here, sending out forms there, associating forms way over there, and having a minor meltdown right here at my desk. In the meantime the one other coworker in the office besides me is griping about how overworked she is and sends me a couple things she wants me to do "whenever you find time."
By the time I left work I felt like I had been whipped and beat. No, wait. I feel like someone had told me they were too busy to whip and beat me and told me to do it to myself and, like an idiot, I did just that. I know on an instinctive level that my reward for keeping things together is going to be someone expecting the same high speed maniac frenzy every day. I can maintain this sort of pace for about a week, but then I crash and burn into the most worthless employee the world has ever seen. If I would simply allow things to progress towards entropy then I would never be asked to do this sort of thing again. But if you succeed once they expect it all the time and will drop any old problem on you. I know this. So why do I go ahead and chain myself to the stockade, take the bullwhip in my mouth, and start cracking it over my shoulder? Because I'm obviously a moron! Didn't we establish this already?
My coworker must have seen me coming because she ducks back inside before I can say anything and so I have to wait until she reappears to be greeted with this little gem.
"The computer's not working."
Four little words with a multitude of meanings in the world of offices. It can mean anything from "the colors look different" all the way out to "the computers have grown legs, joined a labor union, and are picketing us." The computer was sitting on my desk humming smugly so I didn't have to fear the latter end of the spectrum. So I must engage step two in the ritual exchange.
"Not working how?"
It turns out they are working just fine. They boot normally, they log in normally. I can access email, the Internet, and normal desktop applications. All I can't do is access one measly little website. That's all. Just one little website . . . that hosts the application that is the focus for 98% of my job. Oh for crying out loud.
Well, we follow procedure, such as it is, and call the No Help Whatsoever We Pity The Fool Who Calls Us Desk and they told us we were wrong. I'm serious. They said, "We don't see a network outage" and then they hung up. Apparently they thought that we had put a little too much peyote in our coffee and we were hallucinating the screen saying it was an invalid host. To add insult to injury, we found people in other sites actually were connecting just fine. As we got more reports, we discovered that it was not just us, though. Everyone in my sub business had the same problem.
So, when the Lead comes in she gives me the name of someone up on high that I can escalate the problem to as I was getting dismissed down low. I send a message to him . . . and he relays it to someone down low. The script jockeys at the utterly Helpless Desk call me up, have me setup Netmeeting so they can have remote access to my computer . . . and they delete my cookies and my cache. Apparently my computer was taking down the whole network.
Well, to their shock, that doesn't do anything. So they give up. After much complaining two script jockeys contact me later and engage me in a three way chat where two of them are suggesting that I delete my cookies. After that meets with scorn on my part, they then try to convince me that I really don't need to access that site.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
After wasting 3 hours where I am telling them I really do need access to this, they pass the buck to someone else. I call the someone else, he passes it to the site we are trying to access and places a call to them and is consequentially ignored.
This was my day Wednesday. Thursday wasn't any better. Last night, just before I left for the evening, they had elevated the problem to "level 2." Apparently this is the point where they pry the problem out of the hands of the little script monkeys and hand it over to people who have some clue as to what the computers do. This morning, the problem gets fixed.
In sending the me notice that it was fixed, they attached the letter where one of the systems people was informing the help desk in India, who had thus far managed to wrestle defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory, where the problem originated. Apparently my location, which is the headquarters of our sub business, had three dedicated connections to the Internet. "Had" is the appropriate verb because one of them was being phased out over the course of a year. All traffic was now on the two main lines and apparently someone figured it was time to yank the third "useless" pipe . . . a pipe which apparently only carried traffic to one lone website that someone had locked the setting in so it HAD to use that particular connection.
So, for two days I had people in India trying desperately to convince me that I didn't need to use this site rather than fix it before it got to someone who said "Hey! What major changes happened to the network round about that time?" You know, if that was the worst of it, it would have left me with a bad day today . . . but the story gets better.
Yesterday was the first day of a co-worker's week long vacation. Good for her, but she is the person who does almost all the administrative/clerical functions of the office. Almost all, because they trained the new guy on how to cover for her on her days off. And the new guy is . . . ah crap. That's me, right?
Not only am I two days behind on my own work, I am also two days behind on someone else's job as well. All day I was buzzing through task after task. Answering phone calls and emails here, looking up information there, stuffing envelopes over there, making calls over here, sending out forms there, associating forms way over there, and having a minor meltdown right here at my desk. In the meantime the one other coworker in the office besides me is griping about how overworked she is and sends me a couple things she wants me to do "whenever you find time."
By the time I left work I felt like I had been whipped and beat. No, wait. I feel like someone had told me they were too busy to whip and beat me and told me to do it to myself and, like an idiot, I did just that. I know on an instinctive level that my reward for keeping things together is going to be someone expecting the same high speed maniac frenzy every day. I can maintain this sort of pace for about a week, but then I crash and burn into the most worthless employee the world has ever seen. If I would simply allow things to progress towards entropy then I would never be asked to do this sort of thing again. But if you succeed once they expect it all the time and will drop any old problem on you. I know this. So why do I go ahead and chain myself to the stockade, take the bullwhip in my mouth, and start cracking it over my shoulder? Because I'm obviously a moron! Didn't we establish this already?