That's Why They Call It Work

Will try to post something of substance a little later. Work ruled the day.

A couple of posts back, I mentioned that bad things happen when people get overly proactive. And that's exactly what happened today. A switch was replaced on the network--ok, that's necessary at times, and the idea was to clean up a couple of traffic jams that affected some subnets. However, it would be considered good practice to alert at least some people to the change--especially those who handle network configuration for devices like printers and workstations.

In summary, the switch change cleared up a number of traffic jams by dropping several subnets entirely. Great. This necessitated a reconfiguration of workstations and printers that lost their network connections. Workstations are pretty easy to fix, but printers have to be redone at the server and at the network card. Additionally, my supervisor decided to rename several printers to correspond more correctly with an otherwise ridiculous naming convention--this meant that the users had to delete and readd their newly named printers. Most people would probably consider this a very basic operation, but computer literacy has never been high on the list of skills needed for work over here.

And--as an added bonus--the new switch seems to have a few issues of its own--connections between the print servers and some of the printers in the affected area are dropping in spite of the configuration change. Packets are getting caught in a loop of death between two IP addresses. Here's hoping someone will pay attention to the email I sent out explaining what was happening.

But, it could be worse--and it was. Because I tend to work slightly later hours than most over here, I was caught--on my way out the door, no less--by a referral to one of the big shots across the street. This person had a corrupted file in Microsoft Word that wouldn't save. Now, Microsoft could come right out and admit that their software is lame, and prone to bugs like files becoming randomly corrupted, but what's the fun in that? No--instead, Microsoft drums up an error message--in this case, Word erroneously claimed that there was no free space to save the file on, in order, the C: drive, the D: drive, the network share, and the private SAN. Roughly 400 gigabytes of space available, but not in the Microsoft Universe.

Hey, Bill Gates--no, not Bill Gates, Sr., not the large number of people who unfortunately share the same name as Mr. Gates, but who don't happen to be the largest shareholder in Microsoft--no, I mean BILL GATES, JR., he who foisted a subpar Operating System on the world--yeah, you, Bill. Fuck you.

I managed to salvage most of the document, which earned me a partial thanks from said big shot across the street, but this is part and parcel to the Microsoft way. They sell garbage, but package it like it was a dozen roses.

OK--now I feel better.