Saturday, April 01, 2006

Um, I’d like to Cmd+Z That Last Thing I Said, Please.

I’m not going to bore anyone by telling a long boring story centering around how busy I’ve been for the last week or two. That would be a yawner for all of us. Let’s just say that I’ve been busier than a one armed paper hanger and leave it at that. And next week is going to be a horrible mix of boring plane rides followed by flurries of activity during press checks every two hours or so. Crack of dawn flight to the L.A. office on Monday, crack of down flight from L.A. to Toronto on Tuesday, work on Wed. and Thur. and flight home on Fri. My booty hurts just thinking about all that time spent parked in airplane seats.

But that would be boring. Let’s concentrate on telling a story that is embarassing to me personally, shall we?

Last week, during that height of a work related crisis, our T-1 suddnely stopped T-1’ing. We had no connection to the Intarweb at all. I personally felt like I’d lost a limb, but that’s beside the point. The main point is that it wasn’t working. All diagnostics pointed to either a flaky switch/hub on my end or the T-1 itself. Now, the nice thing about T-1’s, is that though they are a bit on the “slow” side when compared against a fancy-schmancy 6Mbit cable connection, they deliver a guaranteed transmission rate. In both directions, unlike DSL or cable. And IT NEVER GOES DOWN. Unless something really screwy is happening at the phone company, which is what we had going on. Seriously, that T-1 had been ROCK solid for months and months and months before last week. The details of what was happening at the phone company are trivial and unimportant, let’s get the embarassing bits of the story, shall we?

So after I figure out that everything on my end checks out OK, I call my ISP. They can ping my co-located server and my co-located router, but nothing else on my side of the fence. Hmmm.

I hang up and do some more goofing around on my end, shut everything down and start it all back up. Everything comes back up, but I still can’t talk to the outside Intarweb. And now I’m jonesings for a Slashdot story, a Fark RSS feed, anything! Please, let me be able to “ping” SOMETHING! But, nope, I got nothing. Call the ISP back. I get the tech on the phone and by this time I’ve decided to have someone at the ISP reboot everything over there. With a co-location account, you get 10 or so “remote hands” events, where someone will walk over to your box, rack or whatnot and smack your equipment back to life. And if things get serious, you can have them hook up a monitor and read you info off the screen, and plus those guys are way smarter than me and should probably be admin-ing my boxes instead of me, but I digress. Now, I have some nice and stable hardware, so I’ve never had to use the service, plus the data center is quite close, but as I said ealier the profound lack of internet was just ONE of the crises I was dealing with that morning, so rather than walk over and defibrilate my equipment, I figured I just have someone reboot everything for me. This is a part of what we are paying for, right?

Tech answers the call and I give out all my info, account name, my name, my b-day… all my identifying bits and we get to “What can I do for you, sir?”

Me: “I’d like some remote hands lovin’ on my router, please.”

Yes, that’s an EXACT quote. Let’s say it again for effect, “I’d like some remote hands lovin’ on my router, please.” Just as soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized what’d I’d said and I began to apologize profusely and said, “I’m pretty sure I didn’t mean that the way it might have sounded.”

“I’ll have someone do that right away, sir,”

“Thanks, Janet, I appreciate it.”

Hung up the phone and went to weep quietly in a corner.

Seriously, what do you want to bet that I (accidentally) seriously tick off all of Canada while I’m there next week?

1. BWAAAA ha ha ha ha!! We are a bit too personal with teh intarweb sometimes, aren’t we.

   Posted by Adrienne  on  04/02/06  at  07:28 AM

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