9:13 AM 2/15/2007
I really do hate having nightmares. Evidently being cut off from my friends and having someone's cake blow my brownies up is nightmare material. Even though it wasn't actually the cake. The guy asked me, "Can you watch my cake for me?" and I made room in the box for the cake and watched with pleasure as he put it in there. And then the box blew up and the manager of the grocery store was asking me what had happened and I realized that when he was putting the cake in there, the cake was placed on top of the bomb he had put in there, and I was trying to whisper this to the manager, and I couldn't say it in a public place and I was trying to get either him to listen to a whisper or else a private office, but he was half-deaf and couldn't understand that I needed to tell him in private. And no one could get in touch with D, which was immensely scary because it was one of those "you must contact the proper authorities" situations, and the proper authorities were out of contact. Scary. (Of course, calling the police never occurred to anyone.)

9:57 AM 2/15/2007
I resent that I have to leave work early in order to pick up the car. But, then, I will have my Vash-san back! Hooray! I will call the auto place when I'm on break or something, and arrange to be picked up at 4, maybe, and that won't be too much time snagged out of my day. And then it'll be Anime Night at home! We'll be starting a new disk of Bleach.

10:00 AM 2/15/2007
Wuh-oh. Looks like the outside connectivity just went out. Thankfully, the exchange server is in the building. Hee, hee.

10:03 AM 2/15/2007
I turn my streaming music player off when leaving the room, to avoid wasting bandwidth.

10:41 AM 2/15/2007
Catching up with the TPS Reports. I'd let them go because I don't technically need to have them all entered until Monday, so when my day is short on time and it's not a Monday, they're the first thing to go.

I need to poke Turbo about the bloody phone in the room. Management says there needs to be one in here, so there should be one in here, and that means that Turbo needs to install it. He's probably going to dump it on the desk, snarl, shove a cord into a hole in the wall, and present me with a book and tell me to RTFM.

10:58 AM 2/15/2007
Turbo has been poked. No idea when he's going to get back to me. Management claims that she asked him a month ago. I'm not surprised that she doesn't have priority, because while she's Management, she's also Not Geek. I'm Geek.

11:24 AM 2/15/2007
Played phone tag with Management. Saw Turbo over there. He's on an upgrade run around the building.

I happened to be in the bullpen yesterday when Turbo called for me. I'd submitted a helpdesk ticket about an issue -- there's this disappearing program that he's had to install several times.

He asked me to please keep an eye out for anything I thought might be out of the ordinary -- anything that could cause damage to the program. Even if it was a denizen of the bullpen deleting the program, he wanted me to tell him. "Ordinarily I wouldn't ask you to snitch..." he said.

"I'm IT!!" I said indignantly, then amended myself. "Well, I'm IT in training. But."

He'd known I'd grok it. Ordinarily, the bullpen is a very internally cohesive environment. We stick by each other and cover for each other in the event of other departments being annoyed. However, there are some things that automatically transcend bullpen loyalty, and one of those things is end-users messing with bits of systems that they have no business messing with. I'm geek. There is no question of where my loyalties lie if things go down.

Well, perhaps the bullpen is operating without a clue, but Turbo knows. He wouldn't be asking me to poke at ports on boxen otherwise, even though I didn't quite know what he was asking or how to do it this time. I'd already come up with a list of the machines that were suffering from a particular problem a couple months ago, and I'd filed a ticket about it then. It didn't get through somehow, but I dug it up and re-sent it, and that prompted the further task. I think I saved him a lot of work anyway. There's a bit of a VNC problem. "The monitoring system" still works on the afflicted boxen. (I just learned the proper name for it. Hooray telnet fun.) So supervisors needing to see into an afflicted box are going to have to coordinate with monitors. Joy.

His ghost server is still on the blink, so profiling a dragged-in machine for the training room for me (and getting my recovered data) are both nasty little tasks. Fortunately, I have that spare HD that I can just leave in his custody. (And, since I'm not dumb, my name's on it.)

Hooray, geeking in the workplace.

Yesterday at work was kind of dire. I whipped up a display spreadsheet at Snarky Lady's request, something to show how some of the scores were arrived at. Then I worked on the database. There was trial and error with things, and I will be doing things to this off and on for probably the rest of the month, unless the Database Guy gets involved.

I think this means that I'll have to start bringing some of my old textbooks to work with me for a little light reading.

Also, Malfoy Senior's UI request involved a lookup table.

I got so pissed off trying to deal with times in access that I figured out that they're stored as hours divided by 24 and just started importing them like that instead of trying to force them into a proper date format. Snarky Lady may think that we do not want to do any more calculations based on them, but she is wrong. We do. Besides, forcing them to import as text is a bitch and a fucking half.

The upshot of all this was that I was in a perfectly vile mood pretty much all evening long, and wound up almost snapping at the Sweetheart Trainee when she was trying to understand the completely optional spreadsheet I wrote us. I also blew off Rev. Not-So-Nice Super when he wanted help with editing. That's not very much like my ordinary work behavior. I am contemplating the use of muffins to attempt to soothe ruffled feathers.

Today, I fill in for Ponytail Dave, and therefore I get to work his shift. 2pm has it all over noon as an arrival time. I have done laundry, shuffled things around the stereo, and might even vacuum just because.

I have a couple working queries, at least. I can get "people who have worked over 4 hours on the job" (which is a staple of later queries to come), "people with any time on the old break screen", "people with over two minutes on the old break screen", and "people with fifteen minutes or more on the old break screen". Now to force it to display with something like hours instead of the hours/24 format.

hcolleen is borrowing Allegra for her early trips to work where she has to sit and wait. Much better than paper and pen. Tigereye-zombie's dodgy power situation makes her not the ideal choice to take with. She needs battery replaced anyway. I told Turbo a bit about my hobby situation over the weekend, and he mentioned that he had a few spare similar model bits spare. (Ah, geeking out with cute guys at work. He opened the door for me, too, in a nice move of chivalry.) It is like my ordinary phone center supervisor dull life got replaced with a geek's life.

Also yesterday was the thing where almost all the machines from 47-114 could not find their roaming profile. I managed to interrupt a nice-sounding BS session between Turbo and two of the newer geekboys by the simple process of appearing in Turbo's field of vision with an unhappy-stressed-face. I explained the problem briefly, he followed me without argument (instead of the "I'll be right there" that someone else might have gotten) and was entirely boggled by the issue. I might have Turbo wrapped around my little finger, but I am going to be careful with this and not abuse it.

Hooray flylady. I was poking around in the closet, realized that it would be way easy for me to go overboard and then burn out on housework, popped out, and set the stove timer for 10 minutes. And in 10 minutes, the closet is something approaching livable, with the roomie's silk shirts hung up happily, the box of winter clothes found space for on the floor standing up on end, and the top of my dresser free for laundry use again.

I think I prefer my green tea very strong and cold, instead of steaming hot and weaker. Good to know. It is also a nastily bitter brew like this, but no worse than coffee.

( little things.. )


• Discovered that the spreadsheets may not be moved, as they employ absolute addressing, not relative addressing, in a whole nest of related spreadsheets, and I don't know how to get it out.


• ( had fun with $ISSUE_SIDE_JOB )


• Utter panic-scene when computers randomly began to reboot themselves after unzipping something. Panic, chaos, disorder, and downtime. I was just about cussing. The "something" proved to be a Cisco Security Agent update file. We lost a couple surveys. Dammit.


• At length I was allowed to go back and finish training. Rather bizarre.


• The lady who upset everyone's April Fool's Day has been calling in every two days or so. She called while I was in the office. This, appropriately enough, was right on top of a discussion about the "NEVER" individuals -- such as "Mike JONES!" and the One-Man Bald Nudity Crusade. It is fortunate for us all that the One-Man Bald Nudity Crusade does not call the workplace. Many people fight with the vending machines. Not many people claim that the vending machine companies are conspiring with the workplace to steal people's money. Even fewer declare that it is better to do business with drug dealers (because they give you what you pay for).


• The Queen Bee hugged us all goodbye. She is one of those people who is a lot easier to get along with if you're working directly with her, because she does not come off well in limited indirect contact, especially when she is just initiating contact to reprimand.


• I didn't get to take my break until after 3:30.


• My elder clone's boyfriend turned 40 today! Hooray, him!

I came back early from break and BSed a bit with my elder clone, who was in the copy room working on a project. Dave Matthews Band Fan Geek blew past us, and said "Joan, dammit." Intrigued, I followed him out to the bullpen, where he proved to be installing the Flash player I had asked about on one of the computers.

Work outsources dinner en masse, with all of us ordering from one place at a time and pitching in our share of the cost of the total order, and sending one person to get it all. Unfortunately, not all of us have all of the menus of all of the places memorized, and some places (like Wendy's) have their menus locked up needing Flash player to see the stuff. Computers are without said player. I privately e-mailed Dave Matthews Band Fan Geek, asking (unofficially) if he could please put that on the bullpen computers, though I could see why if that wasn't possible.
I am going to owe him. He's been calling me "Joan, dammit" because of this -- but it's on that computer now. It's not going to be on all of them, but that one machine has it installed. All of our menu-related needs are to be taken care of over there. Score!

I was horizontal for a while after I came home, but then I went and worked out. Someone was on my funkystairstepper favorite machine, so I did arm stuff, then hit the exercise bike until she was done. I got in at least a half-hour, maybe a whole hour. I didn't check the time when I got in. At least 10 minutes on the bike, then 20 on the funkystairstepper.

Tomorrow should be a decent day.

I got what amounted to a slight reprimand, in private e-mail from the Dave Matthews Band Fan Geek to Stressy College Chick: there is really no need for me to write an essay in my booths out memos. No need to replicate troubleshooting.

At the same time, I am getting "OMG you are so totally the geek who keeps everything around here running!" propz from the phone goons, which I so totally do not deserve. This is because I can do simple things like use the override password to get people who typoed back into the phone system, adjust monitor settings so the image isn't warped, plug keyboards and mice back in, regain focus to the window, close the cascade of fifty billion windows that they opened by clicking fifty billion times, use the program to remove excess logins from the system, explain what happens when their box is forcibly disconnected from the network (display turns red, all is lost, alas), change the screen colors back to what they're supposed to be on the telnet if it is connected, reset the chairs, and explain what's going on in relatively simple terms so everyone can follow along.

( Basic layout of the stuff the phone goons have to log into daily. ) I happen to have RTFM, and therefore I am a Great Geek Goddess amongst mortals.


But as far as actually fixing broken computers and solving real programming issues, I haven't the foggiest and will have to call in for backup.

I noticed with amusement that yesterday morning, when I was monitoring and the Check-In Princess was at the Check-In Desk (and running a job too), Rev. Not-So-Nice Super came all the way from the bullpen back to the monitoring rooms with a dude who came in a little late, telling me, "I need you to find a booth for this dude. He says he was briefed on Dendarii Brewing yesterday."

"You should probably ask the Princess," I said, "because she's check-in today."

It's hard to miss the check-in at the check-in desk in the bullpen. Somehow the good Rev. missed it. (There are three ULC-ordained ministers in the bullpen: me, Rev. NSN-Super, and Comic Pirate Super.) I think I'm definitely Part of the Team in a way that the Princess isn't. (Somehow I got to be More Popular, which is kind of scary, given that at the beginning there was a lot of "You're not as awesome as she is, but that's OK, I guess.")

The prank that's being concocted at work involves sensitive computer equipment. I've never crashed the dialer before, mostly because I do not, as a rule, touch the dialer.

We remote in to the machine in the server room that runs the dialer. I am working up two (or more) desktop wallpapers.

One is the background color of the server in question, with a telnet window open to a dialer crash -- and the taskbar showing an open telnet window.
The other will be a remote desktop window on top of the usual wallpaper of the computer in question, complete with taskbar, with a shot of said faked dialer crash cunningly pasted in.

Add wallpaper, set taskbar to auto-hide.

Instant fake dialer crash.

Goodness, I love screenshots.
Goodness, I love the fact that standard operating procedure is to take a screenshot and send it out with the incident report every time the dialer crashes.

This is one that's good for a second's shocker, followed by relieved laughter.

The IT guys came in yesterday evening around 5-ish to get everything set up for last night's big installation. We'd been seeing some random guy in a manky shirt walking around with a ladder for the past week or so; he turned out to be a data cable contractor.

We got packages from Cisco in the morning on Saturday, and we put them aside for the geeks. Hooray networking fun!

When we got in this morning, the geeks were still here. No one could log in to the computers because they were still getting stuff done on there. They didn't give up the system until 7:30/7:40-ish. That was over 12 hours for them there. It was at this point that I decided that since I couldn't do jack and everyone had to be exhausted and hungry, I was going on a breakfast run. I got doughnuts, bagels, and muffins, plus cream cheese and orange juice. Everyone was essentially happy.

The Dave Matthews Band Fan Geek said that after what they'd done tonight, they didn't deserve doughnuts. I attempted to comfort him. He thought I'd studied networking, and said that tonight was one of the nights that make you wish you'd never gone into the field.

Those are really the nights that you need someone with doughnuts about.

---

ID10T. The local temp files of about 400 discs that I spent so much painstaking time getting rid of so they wouldn't get in my way? Not so local. Not so temp. I called IT (who was still here); the Dave Matthews Band Fan Geek told me to write down the address and he could restore it from Friday's backup. It helped, I think, that I started out the call with "I just did something incredibly end-user stupid; I need a file on the network restored from backup." Didn't get a lecture. I think he's probably thinking that I can lecture myself, given what I said...

In my (meagre) defence: I went to the file from a desktop shortcut, and the machine I was on doesn't display the full path of the directories. (Ouch. I think that even makes it worse.)