How to give a geek a heart attack...
Sep. 6th, 2005 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayYesterday was a Bad Day. The capitalisation is important.
My UPS has been attempting to die for a couple of months. I've even blogged on it at some stage and you all agreed that I should bite the bullet and do something. I know that I should have bought a replacement battery for it weeks ago. So this is my own fault.
The UPS has been failing its weekly battery test, requiring it to beep annoyingly until I shut everything down and reset the UPS. It's still been able to support the 'puter during periodic blackouts, but it's been due for some attention. Yesterday it failed it's regular battery test and couldn't be rebooted. Even more scarily, my computer made pretty patterns on the monitor at the same time.
They looked to me like the "ack! It's killed me!" patterns.
Cue a rapid turn off of everything and me sitting there with that sinking, icky, sick feeling. Y'see, it's been a couple of months since I backed up. I'm a geek. Without my computer and all of its data, I panic.
So I then got to spend a couple of hours digging out some spare power cables and jury-rigging my father's UPS so that I could actually feed the computer some power.
Relief all round when systems were go, no data had been lost and, most importantly, the UPS hadn't fried anything in the computer.
Replacement battery has been ordered. Amazon, the cheapest source, has even dispatched it today, a couple of days ahead of schedule. Lesson has been learnt and warnings about vital hardware will, in future, be headed.
Although that's just blown my fun money for the next couple of weeks :-(
Anyone want to guess how long it took for Nutty Colleague to reduce me to bibbling, incoherent rage this morning?
If anyone guess half an hour, they'd be spot on. This was helped by her being twenty-five minutes late due to traffic. So the reality was about five minutes.
Score!
I was aided and abetted by a thoroughly frustrating helpdesk (Helpdesk - "The document that you're looking for is Document X." Sel - "In Document X, it says that I also need Document Y." H - "Document X is Document Y." Sel - *boggle* "Have you read that part of Document X?" H - "Um." Ten minutes of cicular logic later. H - "Ah, I see what you want. Nope, we're not planning to write that one."), but NC was really doing her best today.
The major problem is that it everyone else in the team was out at meetings. An entire morning of undiluted NC, freed to try her level best to inspire me to homicide with daft requests, incorrect information and a unique talent for never quite grasping what the hell she's supposed to be doing. Woo!
And now I will make phone calls, apply for jobs and do all of the other things that the unexpected computer crash prevented me from doing yesterday. Grrr.
This week is shaping up so well already.
My UPS has been attempting to die for a couple of months. I've even blogged on it at some stage and you all agreed that I should bite the bullet and do something. I know that I should have bought a replacement battery for it weeks ago. So this is my own fault.
The UPS has been failing its weekly battery test, requiring it to beep annoyingly until I shut everything down and reset the UPS. It's still been able to support the 'puter during periodic blackouts, but it's been due for some attention. Yesterday it failed it's regular battery test and couldn't be rebooted. Even more scarily, my computer made pretty patterns on the monitor at the same time.
They looked to me like the "ack! It's killed me!" patterns.
Cue a rapid turn off of everything and me sitting there with that sinking, icky, sick feeling. Y'see, it's been a couple of months since I backed up. I'm a geek. Without my computer and all of its data, I panic.
So I then got to spend a couple of hours digging out some spare power cables and jury-rigging my father's UPS so that I could actually feed the computer some power.
Relief all round when systems were go, no data had been lost and, most importantly, the UPS hadn't fried anything in the computer.
Replacement battery has been ordered. Amazon, the cheapest source, has even dispatched it today, a couple of days ahead of schedule. Lesson has been learnt and warnings about vital hardware will, in future, be headed.
Although that's just blown my fun money for the next couple of weeks :-(
Anyone want to guess how long it took for Nutty Colleague to reduce me to bibbling, incoherent rage this morning?
If anyone guess half an hour, they'd be spot on. This was helped by her being twenty-five minutes late due to traffic. So the reality was about five minutes.
Score!
I was aided and abetted by a thoroughly frustrating helpdesk (Helpdesk - "The document that you're looking for is Document X." Sel - "In Document X, it says that I also need Document Y." H - "Document X is Document Y." Sel - *boggle* "Have you read that part of Document X?" H - "Um." Ten minutes of cicular logic later. H - "Ah, I see what you want. Nope, we're not planning to write that one."), but NC was really doing her best today.
The major problem is that it everyone else in the team was out at meetings. An entire morning of undiluted NC, freed to try her level best to inspire me to homicide with daft requests, incorrect information and a unique talent for never quite grasping what the hell she's supposed to be doing. Woo!
And now I will make phone calls, apply for jobs and do all of the other things that the unexpected computer crash prevented me from doing yesterday. Grrr.
This week is shaping up so well already.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-06 09:02 pm (UTC)Your week seems to be starting off a bit like mine, which hasn't been going well so far. I've been in York for two days which would have been nice if I'd had time to see any of it. Which, if any of the work had gone to plan I would have done. As it was I only *just* managed to catch the train back. First thing tomorrow I have a screwed XP installation to look at *as long as* the daft woman who has the problem actually remembers to bring the machine in this time, 'cos last time she forgot...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-07 02:47 pm (UTC)*g* True, but a new laptop is even lower on my list of stuff to spend my (limited) cahs on than repairing the UPS was. And I can't take out a loan to finance it because I can't afford the repayments :-(
Replacing my now-defunct lappie is something that I plan to save for when I finally get a job.
cos last time she forgot...
Grrr. Sounds like your week is starting out worse than mine. I'm currently working on the theory that if it started this badly, the week has to get better. I'm giving myself permission to scream very loudly if the week actually manages to get worse :-)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-07 03:10 pm (UTC)And I hope it is for you!
This morning the lady in question had remembered to bring her computer in but hadn't brought any of the CDs that came with it. Which was a shame because it was running XP Home and thus none of the several XP Pro CDs I carry were of any use for the particular problem. Still, printed her off plenty of instructions so hopefully she'll be able to fix it herself, now I've checked the disk and done an extra virus scan to make sure that wasn't the problem...
This afternoon I'm supposed to be replacing a disk in a machine. Not sure why 'cos it seems absolutely fine but it's what they're expecting and I seem to remember trying to tell them it wasn't the disk at fault before. If there's any fault at all 'cos it works fine when I'm anywhere near it...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-07 03:33 pm (UTC)So far, it's holding true :-)
If there's any fault at all 'cos it works fine when I'm anywhere near it...
This is the point where you smile, nod and pocket the cash because they're obviously interesting in being seen to do something rather than actually doing the right thing.
Wow, that was very...profiteering of me :-)