Just crap

I thought today was never going to end. Typical Monday at the office, the usual number of “I forgot my password?” requests, one case of a user’s profile vanished over the weekend (had to restore it from tape,) and a rootkit detected on a users workstation in our Wyoming office. All that happened before lunch. After lunch was a whole other set of adventures in IT.

Seems during my lunch break an equipment failure somewhere upstream with our POTS provider rendered the office’s brand new $45,000 phone system useless. We were able to place calls from office to office, but local calls and long distance calls were all dropped. I spent a good two hours on my cell phone with the phone company throughout the afternoon trying to get information and repair status updates. The equipment failure was repaired around 4:15 restoring service and interrupting the unusual silence of no ringing phones. Situation resolved 5 o’clock arrives and I’m flying out the door heading home (I really needed a stiff drink.) BUT NO!

Sure enough, as soon as I got home I get paged to get back to the office. No power! WTF? Jump back in the car start heading to the office, my fourth round trip of the day. On the way back to the office a report comes on the radio that rolling blackouts have been instituted across the state. Wonderful! Last time I checked I live and work in Texas, not California. I almost didn’t make it back to the office in time to preform an orderly shutdown of systems before the batteries in the UPS were completely drained. Shortly after getting to the office the power came back on, but knowing that rolling blackouts were going to be coming and going I decided to just keep most of the systems powered down until the batteries have sufficient time to get back to full charge. That was probably a wise decision since about and hour and a half ago I got another power outage page. No I’m not going to rush back to the office this time. I’m going to bed.