Over the next month or two, work is rolling out a new time clock system.

Currently, workers swipe in to a timeclock with cards, go to their stations, and log in to the computer system to work on whatever project they're assigned to. I keep track of attendance, late arrivals and early departures, and person-hours worked per project. There are a few other frills, but that's my basic job description.

Guess what the new system is going to keep track of automatically?

Heh, heh, heh.

So now I have to wait in suspense and see what's planned for my position, and/or what other positions in the company are open to someone with my experience.

Saturday morning at work was hair-raising. Seems the air conditioning in the server room went down overnight. When people started coming in, it was 95F in there!

Much running around the building looking for fans ensued, to try and get the room cooled down to livable for the machines. Meanwhile, all the phone goons (call center, surveys) start coming in and logging on.

Since I'm just a phone goon supervisor, q/a monitor, and glorified secretary, this was the first time I'd been inside the actual server room, though I'd been drooling over it for a while. Of course, my first thought when I was inside was not "Wow, I'm finally allowed in here," but "where the hell am I going to plug in this fucking fan?" because, hello, server room, all outlets on all power strips full or squashed. They had to run extension cords in to power the fans, finally.

The system had to be brought down half an hour into the shift, and it was down for two hours. John said they had to bring them down because they were starting to lose data. I'm not sure how much data loss there actually was, or if he managed to get us to get everyone out in time to save everything.

At least this is better than the two Saturdays in a row when we had severe phone goon downtime because there was a crucial server outage caused by a failure to reboot after an automatic update.

So something went wrong with my system and I called tech support after much whining, bitching, and complaining on my own time. I started out by explaining to the guy the situation.

He tried to explain to me that they didn't support that. It turned out that he was listening not to what I was actually saying, but to what he thought I was saying. He thought that the modem in question had to be going through the NIC, even though I'd just said that it wasn't. I had to noisily eject the NIC from the computer and prove to him that I was surfing the web before he would make with the listening.

After that, it was all sunshine and roses and he helped me try and troubleshoot. What part of "Everything that goes through this NIC is 75% loss or worse" was he too dense to get?

I think he's not used to working with a person on the other end who actually knows shit about their computer. I swear, the only reason I call tech support (level 1) any more is for their expert systems and for shit I haven't studied yet...

After all that, it turned out to not be the NIC, but hot damn, we could have saved ten minutes if he'd accepted the "Everything that goes through this NIC is lossy and bad, so I want help troubleshooting to see what's the fucking problem" without me having to eject the motherfucker.

Networking and connectivity class. Professor's asking about ways that people can cause a Denial of Service condition.

The usual answer (generate a lot of traffic) is given.

He asks the class for any more responses. There is the usual silence; the class is good at spitting back canned responses, but only a few of us are good at creative thinking.

"Post a link on Slashdot?" I grin.

I'm such a smartass.

So I have my DBA class, and we're installing Oracle 9i on Windows. (2000Pro, IIRC.)

They say that for every labfull of students installing something, a few will zoom through with no problems, most will do all right, and a very few will crash and burn.

Guess whose turn it was?

I hadn't the foggiest what I was doing. It was Naomi trying to do it, but then the kid was right there in her ear, and she kept getting dragged out of it, and she was trying to follow the lab manual, and we think we were doing a pretty good job of it...

But of course, since the computers can detect the slightest hint of ill-preparedness, it struck, and what should have been a 3 hour install took 5 hours of a 4 hour lab, and 2 hours of teacher help.

I sat back and let the Alpha Geek do his thing. Naomi was crashing at that point anyway. ...I just hope that I have the passwords written down come Monday and lab time again.

I rarely comment here, because I'm shy, but it makes me feel good when I do post, and I get modded up. +2, Funny. Very validating to note that at least two other people found my comment amusing.

WD-40 should be avoided in the groinal area, really...

Agreed to help person with website. Said person was the wife of one of my roommate/sister's co-worker/friends.

Website was business website: roommate/sister was planning on going into business as an attachment of her friend's wife.

Warning #1: business/pleasure. Especially with new friends.

Warning #2: Save the Drama fo' yo' Momma.

Lady didn't. Every bloody day. Either it was all stellar/perfect/wonderful/get rich, or it was crackers & the FBI's computer crimes division getting called.

Warning #3: I'm 23 (22 at the time). She was 20. Not a good age for my boss to be.

Warning #4: ethics. As in, ethics-free. Oy.

Suffice to say that kaboom happened. Spent 10 hours coding a pretty sweet site.

Wouldn't you know that as soon as my roommate/sister decided that the friendship was over, both computers of the business "died", with all info on drives unrecoverable?

And wouldn't you know that I'd been an idiot and hadn't saved a backup?

Thank you, drive through.

Happily for me, my e-mail address evidently sent out a buttload of spam Friday. The bouncebacks are trailing down. I am annoyed, as I obviously didn't send it.

Went to the website so advertised, and informed them that one of their little goons had illegally forged my address as the "from" address on a batch of spam, and would they please see that this would not happen again.

Whee!

Found that I can enter programmingtrance very very fast while coding SQL.

Grr.

It disgusts me that people who otherwise might be nice, pleasant human beings will call homosexuality a disease in public, and make reference to teaching their children that it is.

Takes everything I have to not flame them.

So there's this cute yellow bubble-envelope in the mail, and I know from the return address that there's something interesting in it, and I open it up and see ... ... an AOL cd folder.

Hisss.

But wait! There is a note written on it!

"I just used this to protect the real CD."

I fall over laughing and have to show my roommates, who are suitably amused.

Inside is the David Weber Honor CD, which is cool.