Daylogs. Are they, as a friend here asked me, becoming a
vote dump? Well, hell, I hope so!
Today continued the never-ending chain of not having enough sleep. Had to wake at 6:30 to take me mum to the airport, at which point there's no reason to not keep going on to work. Stopped after dropping off the car to achieve some caffeine at Dunkin' Donuts. The anti-Starbuck's nature of the chain always makes me feel righteous, and besides, if you don't let them put anything in it the plain coffee is surprisingly good. And cheap. I avoid a donut, reasoning that if I can avoid temptation there I can surely make it the rest of the day without screwing up my calorie intake.
9:42 am:
Bell Atlantic, now known as
Verizon (but a
midden by any other name would smell...well, you get the idea) explains that my data
T1 (which was 5th on the tech's list of jobs on Monday morning) is now 8th on the tech's job sheet. How the hell does that happen? I not-so-tactfully remind them that they are now eighty-plus days late on this T1 install, which instigates a silence, some paper-shuffling noises, and a promise of a callback. Just in case they're not lying this time, I call the
colo facility and warn them to be on the lookout for a sleepwalking Verizon tech.
11:33 am:
Oh,
that's where those two $10K servers are. UPS delivered them
back to the manufacturer and they haven't re-emerged. Call the company and deliver a mild
howler.
1:49 pm:
The UPS guys show up with four computers - none of which are the missing ones, and which in fact were all ordered weeks after the missing ones. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I sign for the machines. While the UPS guy is using his
neato Buck-Rogers-in-fecal-brown technology datapadd to laserscan the bar codes on the machine boxes, the thing keeps beeping nastily. He tries five times. Finally, with a sigh and an
expletive, he pulls a pen out from behind his ear. I wait for him to type the
bazillion-digit number into the hideous
membrane keyboard, but I'm disappointed. He begins
coloring over the bars in the bar code. After a few seconds, he scans again. Nothing. He colors over some more bars. As far as I can tell, he's actually coloring between a few of them, which should technically change the number represented; however, after three iterations of this, the scanner
dings happily and accepts the number. I'm not brave enough to ask to see what number it eventually comes up with. So instead of saving us time by reading the barcode thus saving us from typing in a long (but
human-legible) number, we've managed to force the delivery guys to learn how to
fix bar code labels with felt tip pens. Oh, gee, that looks like an efficient use of time.
4:20 pm:
After twenty minutes of
sworking, realize that
VA Linux has changed the configuration of their servers yet again - just enough so that the default Red Hat install
distro won't actually * $& R%*(&(@! work. Call them to bitch. End up having to hack a CD-ROM onto the thing just to get it installed.
8:40 pm:
Head off for Indian cuisine with a bud to discuss how the hell I'm gonna get my sad behind back into school.
10:28 pm:
Aaah.
Quality time with the
ferrets. Much
hilarity and chewing of socks amidst noding. Life is - tolerable, then, for the time.