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i can't actually guarantee that "awryness is, in fact, a real word. But I like it here. It works. And if I look it up and I find that it really doesn't exist, it will bother me until I take it down. So I stay blissfully unaware of its dictionarial status. Hmmmm, is "dictionarial" a word?
what's that? You want to know how my work problem from yesterday came out? Just horribly, thank you for asking. My problem was twofold. the first part of the problem was very uncomplicated and very annoying. The regular UPS guy that delivers to our Georgia plant is on vacation. You know the regular UPS guy. The guy that everyone knows. The guy that may show up one, two or three times a day depending on what deliveries and pickups you have. The guy that might rearrange his pickup schedule in the afternoon and come back later in the afternoon for you because you aren't ready yet because you're boss hasn't made up his mind yet about what should go in the package. The kind of handsome guy (not that I'm gay or anything) who can sort of make that ridiculous down uniform look good. That guy. That guy is on vacation. Instead they have the lazy rotating fill-in driver. And everybody knows this guy too. This is the guy that shows up at 3:00 in the afternoon and says if you're package isn't ready, you'll have to take it to the nearest drop box but, no, he isn't quite sure of the exact location of the closest one, but he can direct to the one on the other side of town. The slovenly UPS guy that has his brown shirttails hanging out of his brown shorts. The guy that doesn't talk to you. At. All. The guy that (and this is the one crucial to the story at hand) delivers the next day air packages at one freaking thirty in the afternoon! Yeah. That guy.
So now that our Georgia facility has lost an entire morning of productivity because of Lazy McSlovenly, I also find out that the one computer literate person in the office down there had to leave the office for the afternoon. Ack. So do I wait another day or do I try to walk someone else through the setup and configuration of this box? Either way, I lose. I reason that the setup is pretty easy. But is that easy to me or just easy to the average citizen? Yes, but I'll be on the phone, so it will be like I'm right there. Ha. Ha ha. That was dumb. So yes, I choose the option that could do more damage. I have another person there hook the box up between the router and the internal hub and show him how to change his IP address so his system can see the box on the network. I walked him through the steps of loading the saved configuration file (that I cleverly had saved from the failed box). And this is the point in the story when the box becomes completely unresponsive. Now the only way that anyone can get into the box to configure it is to set up a console session through a serial port on the box. Did I really want to try to explain what a male-to-female RS-232 serial cable looked like and, if one could be found, walk him through setting up a telnet session in a terminal emulation program? Uh, no. So I'm left with that nasty failure feeling again because an one of our plants can't enter orders or quote pricing. Now there is another little fact creeping into my consciousness. If I had just had the unit sent to me in NJ, I could have configured and tested it and then sent it down to GA all ready to simply snap into place. It would have resulted in the same amount of down time. It would have saved me hours of frustration for the simple cost of another overnight delivery. That is, if I am able to get it working tomorrow.
You know that you have to come back now. You're hooked on my pathetic life.
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