A sign of just how eventful my week’s been; this is pretty much the only thing of any real significance, since I’m still waiting on things like, you know, job applications to come to fruition (I’ll post more on that tomorrow, or later on tonight). I did my usual thing of late, that being staying up until whenever o’clock in the morning instead of going to bed, well, when most normal people would consider going to bed. When I did decide to finally crash, I did so for maybe an hour or so. Got up, futzed around for a bit, then fended off the mother’s insistent demands that I absolutely must go to Pembroke next weekend. And then sat down to do my usual routine of check email, laugh at email, reply to the occasional one, then cruise the flist. Except no internet. Checked on my various TV show downloads, no connection. Went into the other room and futzed with the router for a bit, notta. Powercycled both modem *and* router, she still no worky. Well fuck, my first official TekSavvy outage. And what craptastic timing.

So I call them up, somewhat reluctantly (I’m still used to Bell’s tech support. Sue me.), and turns out it’s a known issue with the modem that when powercycled, it loses the configuration settings and needs to be set up again. Well fuck, again. At least these guys have a clue what they’re talking about, anyway. About 20 minutes later on my slower than the second coming laptop, we had us a newly reconfigured modem. Another 30 seconds and I was back online. For… 45 minutes. Further investigation revealed it had decided, yet again, to forget my settings. And this time it wasn’t because I powercycled. Well fuck, and fuck again. I didn’t wanna do anything productive tonight anyway.

So while on the phone with someone because, well, I likes me some damn good conversation and she usually provides an awesome one, we get to talking about music. It gets to a song she hasn’t heard that I figure she’ll find absofuckinglutely hillarious, and then I’m reminded. Duh, moron, you can has no internets. Which meant another 20 minutes because, to demonstrate my utter lack of preparedness for chrisis situations, I’d turned off my slow as hell laptop in favour of the much faster beast in the living room, which I’m using now, and which is conveniently nowhere in ethernet cable range of the craptastical modem. Clearly I was on some serious crack when I planned the layout of this network. Needless to say it managed to be fixed a second time, and it *looks* like the temporary bout of amnesia we were fighting has apparently subsided. Or at least has gone on a hopefully permanent vacation. I did learn something from all this, though. Speedtouch modems, or at least ones of this particular model, are absolute crap, and should be set on fire. *After* a suitable replacement is located.

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I got up at about 6:10, was promptly stuck to my bed (not due to lazyness for a change!), and then came into work to find out somebody I had call a customer back lastnight pretty much reversed everything I’d already done and did it his way. Needless to say today is not looking all too off to such a wonderfully glorious start. On the bright side, at 11:30 ISH or so I get free food! They’re throwing a thanks for coming out bbq today, so I officially didn’t necessarily have to pack anything. I did, though, ‘cuz well, I’m an idiot. Or maybe just because everyone needs an afternoon snack. Or… something.

Oh, and random PS: Environment Canada, if Ottawa gets one more thunderstorm watch this week and no thunderstorm, I’m gonna raise some serious hell. Or, hey, can we settle for rain at least? I’m not entirely demanding…

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On the bright side, I can’t say it’s exactly been busy today. On the other hand… see subject line. Since I still can’t put the call I just got off of into words, I’m just gonna say this. It would take a hell of a lot less time to fix your computer if you’d stop interupting me every 5 minutes to vent about how you’ve been waiting 5 days already and don’t have time to wait anymore to have your computer fixed. Oh, my american friends, why do you mingle with such moronity?

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So the last couple days, for whatever reason, the topic of people’s entitlement issues, be they disabled or otherwise, came up in conversations that were had with samari76. Reasons they should not be had on such a frequent basis: I got the ultimate entitlement call this morning. Warning: technical terminology follows. I am not defining it.

Ordinarily I don’t bother to post crap that goes on here in great detail on here because really, it’s not worth mentioning. But this one, ohmygod. For the blind/visually impaired folks on my list, if you thought the entitlement issues had by some of us were huge, this one’ll floor ya. Girl calls in, has had a few things replaced on her system already. A HD, a motherboard, her memory. System’s about 2 years old so yeah, stuff’s gonna start to go whacky. The guy she talked to like a month ago decided he’d be an idiot, and tell her she’s entitled to a system exchange if something else on that system fails. Not a very inteligent thing to say to a customer like this; you’ll see why momentarily.

Fast forward to today. She calls in because she can’t get into Windows. Says she gets a black screen that tells her to hit f1 to continue. That’s pretty much all the last technician she spoke to put in his case notes, anyway. So he futzed around with it, and decided that she can’t get into Windows because her CD drives are done. At this point, he gets half credit; the CD drives *were* toast. But as it turned out after she escentially got pissy and was sent to me for a system exchange (why he didn’t try putting it through on his own is beyond me, other than it’d never get approved), not her actual issue. All it was was pretty much chicky was too fucking lazy to press f1. So to shut her up, I ended up going into the bios and escentially telling the computer not to look for anything atached to the ports her CD-ROMs were atached to. Poof. Instant ability to boot into Windows. Root cause of the issue? User failure.

And now, I go write up that work order to have her CD-ROMs replaced. Why must most people possess an IQ lower than 3…?

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Because I’ve got a grand total of 10 minutes.

• It may just be me, and the fact my tolerence for pain of various types being insanely high, but the suicide wings from Local Heroes didn’t really have a whole lot to them. Not that the people from work I went with would agree with me.
• I’ve discovered why it is my two microphones don’t like this computer. There’s an issue somewhere between sound card and OS. I suspect strongly the sound card is to blame. Dell will be receiving a phone call.
• Dell *did* receive a phone call earlier, but now Bell Canada has graduated from randomly kicking me off the internets to apparently randomly disconnecting me during phone calls, and not allowing me to call out for extended periods. And since I only had half an hour to twist a technician’s arm into replacing my sound card, I shall have to take another crack at it tonight. Technology sucks.
• It’s the middle of freaking May. And we’re getting a potential frost warning. I see a problem here. Do you?

And now, I go to work. This batch of randomness brought to you by too goddamn early.

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Unless you’re already very familiar with the brand of modem you’re troubleshooting. Sadly, I am forced to admit at the moment, I’m not. So setting up the new modem will wait until tonight, when I’ve had a chance to read up on it and figure out how the hell to cold reset the sucker so it can actually be useable. In the meantime, someone had been repeatedly urging me to grab some sleep and I have been ignoring her. I shall correct that now, for all of… half an hour.

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