Legend of Murphey’s Law
Y’know… bleh.
Ever have one of those days? Let me give you a rundown of my day…
WARNING: I get a wee bit technical.
9:15 - Come in to work, late because of two accidents on 355.
9:16 - I am informed that a printer I installed last night isn’t working properly. I spend twenty minutes with the print server administrator getting the right drivers uploaded.
9:50 - Everyone can print to the printer except for one person.
10:30 - After troubleshooting, it turns out that Windows 2000 is incompatible with the driver. I begin work to hunt down an older driver and load it to her computer locally.
10:45 - She is printing, so I finally return to my desk and am handed a laptop I’ve been expecting. So I load it up and while doing so, fire off a Zelkun update.
11:00 - The lady who’s printer I was working on calls to complain about her computer not working, completely bypassing the ticketing system. I head on up.
11:15 - I find out the docking station for her laptop is bad, making her external monitor flicker. I run upstairs to grab another.
11:30 - The new docking station works, but I find out her network jack in the wall is broken. I painstakingly crawl over the fifteen picture frames on TOP of her laptop to disconnect her, then crawl over the bags of random items under her desk.
11:50 - After successfully relocating her to a new location, I find that the network jack in the new location is inactive.
12:20pm - I get a call from Jeremy, a friend of mine from TekSystems, we were supposed to go to lunch today, and he had arrived at the building. I tell him I’m finishing setting the lady up, and I’ll be about ten minutes.
12:30 - After finally getting her set up at a working port with a working docking station, her computer flickers and freezes, tapping the chasis causes it to freeze, so I head upstairs to swap her hard drive.
12:50 - The symptoms are resolved with a new laptop chasis, unfortunately, Windows refuses to recognize the network card. I call Jeremy and tell him it doesn’t look like I’ll make it to lunch.
1:20 - For some reason, a flash drive I borrowed isn’t working. I burn the network drivers to a CD. Oddly, the 32MB CD takes ten minutes to burn. After which, my computer locks up.
1:30 - The drivers don’t work, a couple co-workers and I pronounce the laptop dead. Preparations for rebuilding and deploying a temporary laptop are underway.
2:00 - The external hard drive I’ve been backing up the data to fails. At the same time, a machine I was imagining gets caught in a boot loop.
2:30 - After a second attempt at imagining, I set the machine aside and begin building a new one. At the same time, I build the replacement laptop and begin a new data transfer onto a flash drive.
2:50 - The data transfer is a success, and the replacement laptop is nearly complete. After turning down a kind offer to replace machines on the twelfth floor, I grab my jacket, ask Mike, a co-worker, to name a machine when it finishes imaging, and escape to eat.
3:10 - I eat a Wendy’s Chili and a side salad. They are very good. The straw for my Dr. Pepper has a hole in it and sprays me a little.
3:40 - I return to work to find that Mike forgot to name the machine I was building. (to clear the air, I don’t blame him, but it did add to the day)
4:20 - A guy knocks on our door. Like an idiot, I ask if I can help him. He then shows me a nice Blue Screen of Death. So I move over the three computers I’m working on to make just enough space for his, when Mike says he has a lot of space and a it of free time, and takes the laptop off my hands. While he tries to pull data, I pull another laptop to replace his.
4:25 - Steve (another co-worker) tells me he just happens to have a laptop nearly completed. Which takes another bit of burden off of me. That’s when I look at the laptop I grabbed from the back and see that it won’t power on. I add it to my pile.
4:50 - With the machines I’m building nearly complete, I see a ticket for a lady that needs an aircard installed. I figure I have just enough time to help her. I find out that the entirety of her aircard management software is corrupt, and must be repaired, manually deleted, uninstalled, registry entries cleared, and reinstalled. All remotely.
5:50 - I finally hang up with her, and set to deploy the machines I’ve been building.
6:10 - The machines placed, I run away from the place as fast as I can.
6:50 - I arrive home, and toss my coat on my bed. My stepfather then asks me to look at his computer, he’s having some problems.
7:15 - I eat dinner.
7:30 - I help my stepdad out with his computer some more. (I love him, but I am SO sick of computer problems at this point.)
7:50 - I finally sit down to write the tirade you just read.
Thank you and good night.
Zel-kun out.