Glorious, glorious silence...

I walk in to the office this morning after being gone for a week, sit down at my desk and start reading my e-mail. I have voice mail on my phone, I can tell because the little red light is on and quite bright this morning (I commonly refer to my phone as being "broken" if that light isn't on, because it usually is) to indicate I have many messages waiting for me. I was staring at that light, musing on how much I've come to loathe certain pieces of technology when I noticed that one of my call appearance buttons was flashing (That would be "a line was ringing" to the non-telcom geeks in the audience). Staring at it in disbelief, I tried to understand why it was flashing to show an incoming call but the phone wasn't ringing.

That's when I remembered setting the phone to "do not disturb/send all calls to voicemail" before I left for last week's training. I did this to show some mercy to the people with cubes around me -- they get tired of the phone ringing and the Outlook mail notification going full-tilt boogie during the day if I'm not there.

So the dilemma that I am faced with today is: should I "accidentally" forget that one of the major sources of annoyance in my job is silenced, and leave it that way for the rest of the day?

Trivial pursuits...

I have just concluded vacuuming the cat by spending twenty minutes cleaning the little washer-type devices that read which way the mouse is moving. Why did I indulge in this particular pastime, you may ask... Well, gentle reader, it's mostly because I got completely fed up with how the mouse was handling; no matter what direction I moved the mouse I got this weird vibration and "rasp-rasp-rasp" noise. I remembered this mouse being a lot smoother and better handling in the old days, so I tore it apart and promptly wished for tweezers and some rubbing alcohol. I ended up settling for my Pentel .5 mechanical pencil, using the tip to scrape the crud off. The end result is that the mouse handles properly again, and I was able to kill 20 minutes of boring time at work.

I wish Sun still made optical mice for their workstations. I've been spoiled by the one I have on my desktop at home.

Thoughts from the 4th level....

Because I was out for training last week, I am on call this week.

At 1410 CST our link with Cable and Wireless, one of the ISPs that service our office, took a hit thanks to a line failure -- or so it seems. At 1540 CST our BGP table, which also took a hit thanks to the line failure, began to suck. Routing upstream of our location is not functioning properly for two of our class C networks, the ones that we just so happen to care about the Internet being able to reach (naturally). Cable & Wireless sucks at tech support, they suck at troubleshooting, and in general they are airheads of the highest caliber. I opened a ticket at 1603 CST. Somehow I doubt they'll get back to me in the next 15 minutes, meaning I will have to call them to annoy them and find out what is going on up there at their POP. I equally doubt they'll be able to fix this problem in anything approaching a timely manner, meaning I will not get much rest tonight.

Phuq.

Update on my outage...

Well, it appears that C&W fixed the routing problem. They're telling me that VIP crashed at the NAP that services my office... I can't call them on this one because I have absolutely no idea what VIP is. I know what VoIP is, but the tech most definately said VIP in this case. So I just sort of took them at their word and said "Thanks for getting it fixed, go ahead and close the ticket."

So it looks like I very well may get to have a nice restful evening at home tonight, and for that I'm very much thankful. I'm rather tired this evening, although I'm not sure why... the day at work was pretty quiet and unstressful (minus the hideous internet outage).

Well, tomorrow is another day. The good part is I have no stupid staff meeting! Bwahahahahahaha!