In Pursuit of Mysteries

Stuffy Stuff Stuff

Well, today felt like Monday to me until I hit Latin.

I took yesterday off from work with almost no notice. I decided that after Hell Week this last week and some issues this weekend that having a nice Monday at home with R would be nice. We slept in, had a nice breakfast and then went and saw a movie. The debate was “Daredevil or Chicago??” but intelligence seemed to overcome the geek factor and we went to Chicago. I must say that I had somehow missed out on the fact that this movie was a musical in large ways. I just thought it was set in the Jazz Cabarets of Chicago. That being said, I did enjoy the movie and it’s probably one of the better ones that I’ve seen in a while. (I was warned away from the new Kevin Spacey film and towards The Quiet American by a movie reviewer friend as well.)

Today I went back to work and it seems like I didn’t miss much yesterday. We still have my reorg coming up and it still hasn’t actually been announced officially to any team. We keep waiting and waiting for the official announcements. I’ve been through enough of these that it doesn’t bug me too much but I think my guys are wigging out a little about it as they are all much more recent hires than me.

Latin class was fun though I swear I had to fight not to nod off during the overly long discussion of scanning Latin poetry and Ovid. I’m not really a poetry kind of guy and I don’t get off on reading in metre except during invocatory verse so a 25 minute session on how to read five lines of Ovid was a bit much. I’m much more interested in Renaissance Latin and its texts than a lot of the actual Roman material though I do look forward to being able to read Cicero some day.

(I still think the Carthaginians should have kicked Roman ass too…)

I’ve been reading reports of Pantheacon today and feeling bad that I didn’t go this year. As you may recall, o longtime readers, I went last year and posted my field reports from my laptop.

Ah well, perhaps next year. We have five and a half weeks until we fly to Greece anyway.

Incompetant IT People

Rant mode here…

This has been a hell week.

I get e-mail on Tuesday at work saying “We’re moving your e-mail box to a new mail server in another NT domain because you work in the Windows group these days.”

They called it being “Windeployed” as it is the Windeploy domain. The nickname for it in my group is “Windestroyed.”

The record for fuck ups associated with it is three weeks of domain trust issues, access problems and downtime…

So, Wednesday night, they move my mailserver… I wander in Thursday morning with my printed out instructions on follow up duties to move my mail profile and follow them. Nothing works. I can’t get my mail. The mail server won’t talk to me and farts in my general direction.

I call helpdesk, as my instructions say… I speak to MULTIPLE incompetents in a couple of different groups over the course of five hours. Meanwhile, my e-mail is down. I’m a lead. I manage a test team. Better yet, we’re reorganizing this week and I’m going to be in charge of the testing of new feature work in Internet Explorer going forward and all of that just came down on Monday and Tuesday…. I need my e-mail to do my job. Most of my work is mediated via e-mail and meetings (I know, it’s a sad life…).

Eventually, at 3:00 pm, I get access to my e-mail and I use it for two hours before leaving for Latin class to get caught up on some work and send out some meeting stuff I’m organizing for 20+ test leads and test plan reviews.

Yesterday, Friday, I come into work in the morning and attempt to log into my computers as a user (not even e-mail specific here). Nope. Can’t log in. It doesn’t like me. Doesn’t recognize my passwords or my username (non-specific error messages are great…)

Call helpdesk. Spend five minutes arguing with a tech that won’t listen:

Him: “Oh, you have an open ticket from yesterday but its been escalated.”
Me: “No, dude, this isn’t the same problem.”
Him: “Yes, it is! I’ll transfer you.” Repeat for five or ten minutes
New Guy: “Hi, I’m your new tech, I understand you’re having e-mail issues today.”
Me: “No, I can’t log into my fucking computer. This has nothing to do with e-mail.”

Things proceeded downhill from there.

Eventually, the situation works out as follows:

1. When they moved me to the e-mail server, they weren’t supposed to move my domain account, just my e-mail.
2. Because of the e-mail only move, they made me an account in the new domain to act as a placeholder but they disabled it for logon since I wasn’t supposed to actually use it.
3. Some talented new hire then converted my old account in my original domain into a stub to hold my contact information but not as a full account anymore.

Net result: I have an account in the new domain but it’s disabled. My account in the old domain has effectively been deleted. With no functioning accounts, I can’t log into the corporate network at all which means I can’t get to network resources, my own files, or my e-mail. I can log in as administrator and surf the Internet though. Go figure.

No one had the authority to uncheck the “Disabled” check-box on my account so they had to go call around to find the right administrators. At about 3:00 pm (sound familiar?), they finally activated my disabled account in the new domain. I and the actually competant tech that finally worked with me figured that this was far safer for me than to try to get my original account turned back on (even though I technically shouldn’t have lost it).

Total downtime in two work days: 11 hours or so. What was I working on this week? I have no fucking idea now…

On a plus note, when I finally got logged in again and checked my e-mail, I had all of my mail from before the move of mailservers on Wednesday night and I had all of the mail that had been queuing up on Friday but all of my Thursday mail had vanished. I had no mail from anyone since the move Wednesday night until Friday and none of the mail (including those big meetings that I scheduled) that I had sent were in my own mailbox. I had to ask my boss to forward me the requests for my own meetings back to me. Nice.

Lessee, total for week:

1. Reorg of team at work concluding with loss (to a new boss for them) of my two star testers who have only ever worked for me
2. Doodle the Ferret dies of cancer, thus traumatizing me and R.
3. Two days of non-work involving ever larger increases in blood pressure.

Luckily, the curse afflicting me only seems to affect work related stuff and pets so I probably won’t die in a car crash before the stars realign. Shit.

Interesting…

http://www.signumpress.com/Issue6/index.html

Or more to the point:

http://www.signumpress.com/Issue6/marrow/teo.html

Reading both of the issues of “Whatever happened to the Cyberculture?” bit is kind of odd for me. It seems that I’m right in that nexus. I was a Geek who got on the Internet in the late 80s through a hacked account at the Engineering dial-in at the university, played on the muds, ran a BBS and read Mondo 2000 as it started coming out… Later on, I worked in Tech Support as the “Year of the Internet” (per Time Magazine in 1994) hit. Then I was a webmaster and then a tester on Internet Explorer 4 and then IE5… I worked for MSN as a contractor in 1996 before I worked on IE and I worked for MSN as a test lead just this last year… I remember the first issue of Wired and how completely cool it was for me. I remember being on the Extropians original e-mail list in college and getting their Zine. I remember Cypherpunks starting and being on its e-mail list for the early years of crypto thought online…

There’s probably a book or something in it but there is hardly enough distance to write it and I’m not the best necessarily for it anyway. I was definitely part of the Gen-X group that hit things at just the right time to precede the Internet boom for years and, now, to follow it after its imposion. I’ve spent half of my life online now (and I’ll be 32 this year).

This is the part where I could go “Where did it all go wrong?!” but I know… Money has its own force, demands and gravity. It sucked us in, deflated our dreams and made the whole thing base and ordinairy.