Ahh, what a cheesy day. All in all, not too bad, but the end kinda blew. I should've known better than to drive my piece of shit car that seems to mysteriously stall out and not start for days in the rain... It began rather innocently, with a minor triumph. I recently finished writing a utility to compensate for that fact that people here can be completely oblivious fucking idiots. Four different departments within our company have a standalone computer running rinky-dink consumer fax software in order to function as "receiving fax machines." Receiving fax machines that cost over a grand, running on 833 MHZ PIII's with 128 megs of RAM. Yeah... Unfortunately they aren't too stable, even though they're running that oh-so-great pinnacle of stability, Windows 2000. When everything is working ok, a fax comes in every 2 minutes or so. But when, for whatever reason, the fax program shits itself, the morons will not call it in until they haven't received a fax for three to four hours...
Then they tell ME "We haven't gotten a fax in four hours!" My response is "It took you four hours to notice this?" So in order to compensate for these lazy fucks I wrote a little program in Visual BASIC to e-mail me whenever x amount of time has passed without a new fax. It works like a dream, except for one PC, which used to work until our genius net-admin swapped it out with an entirely different PC. He insisted that the problem (can't find MSMAPI32.OCX file for interfacing with the Exchange Server) was in my source code, when in fact it was a permissions problem. The triumph was finding the error message on Microsoft's website, sending him the FAQ with a short e-mail saying "YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!@#," and ba-da-bing, it's fixed in 2 minutes, when he's been dicking around for two days trying to figure it out. He's kind of a network fascist, giving extremely little access to those within his own MIS department... What a stupid, geeky (although the cynical Linux gods will say VISUAL BASIC? OCX? HOW DARE YOU PRESUME TO CLAIM TO PROGRAM!) thing to daylog about, I think I'll move on...
Noding at work can be so nice. I'm really privileged to have the ability, after having two other jobs where I was a rat in a cage with a PC that couldn't do anything. Blah. Now I can dink around, but I get paranoid and wonder if they read my shit somehow... But I'll come out and say it -- I'm getting drunk at work. Not on the clock, mind you. I skipped lunch so I could get out of here a half hour early and see the love of my life who just got back into town. But of course my piece of shit car stalls out in the middle of the freezing rain, luckily within a block or two of my job...grr. So after forcefully struggling to park it (with the assistance of two lovely (meaning nice, not extremely sexy or anything) ladies who just came out of nowhere, helped me, then disappeared without a word), I ran back to work in a fury, screaming "God fucking damnit" at the top of my lungs, and called home. I really like yelling, especially when everyone hears it through their car windows, and looks at me like some kind of insane freak for having the capacity to express my emotions. She isn't fucking there. Damnit. I call her parents' house. She was just there and left! Damnit! So all in all I skipped lunch so I could get home far later. She should've gotten home by now, but no freaking answer. GOD DAMNIT! So I run outside, completely infuriated (not at her, of course...the situation), pathetically wanting to exercise some sort of power that will get me home.
Then I realize there's a liquor store across the street. How pathetic I am. I'm not an alcoholic or anything, but I've just quit smoking cigarettes for the nth time, and have a tendency to blow every little thing out of proportion, especially when I've handicapped myself yet again with a ridiculously evil drug. So I go across the street and buy a $7.99 bottle of Skyy vodka...It's grain alcohol, not potato based, but it's as close as you can get to 100% ethanol and H2O...go back to my office...and here I am now, at about the equivalent of 4.5 beers. Ahh... I really think I have a valid excuse to be doing this. Like I said, I'm not on the clock, damnit. But I'm using valuable company resources to node this. Shucks.