A bad day (long)

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I was supposed to have been free yesterday and today. Yesterday was great! Weather was sunny and warm, and I went on a long bike ride and then a run. I had no reserves left in me… all was spent. It was a good training day. Today I planned to take it easy: start off with a breakfast at Starbucks, maybe go to downtown Seattle, check out the Army/Navy surplus and Elliott Bay Books....

The tale of woe begins last night. I had some work to catch up on. The work took much longer than I had hoped so I was still up late last night, when I received a message from myself! Actually it was an emergency page from work. One of our remote buildings had disappeared off the network. I knew right away it was an issue with a provider (their name rhymes with horizon) and as I was on vacation I sent an e-mail to my cohorts asking them to call the provider in the morning. Having exercised due diligence, I finally went to bed at 3AM, much later than my usual 12AM.

My work cell phone woke me up mere 5 hours later at 8:00AM. I recognized the voice on the other end as belonging to one of my less likeable co-workers. Let’s call him Grima Wormtongue. Tolkien fans can probably already guess why this office worker isn’t likeable. Grima and another guy drove out to the remote location and called the provider. The provider had them unplug our $10,000 router and connect a laptop directly into the connection. Miraculously the connection worked. Was our Uber router defective? No, actually. When the provider’s support rep asked Grima to test the connection, they gave him a network address to hardcode on the laptop, or else the connection wouldn’t work. However, the network address they gave him is not the same one I’m aware of, and is not the same one programmed in our router.

My 8:00AM fuzzy tired and sleepy brain took a few seconds to comprehend the information and come to an inescapable conclusion. The provider changed their network address range and altered the routing tables, overnight, without informing us. Our connection was effectively issued a new address on the provider’s side. But since the corresponding changes need to be made on our side as well, and we were never told, that change effectively killed our connection. This is a very expensive business-class connection with a static network address, precisely in order to avoid issues such as this.

I hung up, got out of bed, got dressed, and drove over there.

Here’s where the fun begins. I wasn’t able to simply connect to the network and reconfigure the router. The routers at our remote locations are manageable only from our central office, through the Internet connection. In other words, I was cut off from making the necessary changes since the management connection was effectively dead. I had to remove the router from the equipment rack and take it with me back to my office, while enduring the questionings and hostile glares of the local users who, naturally, blamed the outage on me.

Back in my office, walking through the front door and walking down the hallways on my supposed day off work, enduring lame attempts at socializing from various office drones, and putting up with half a dozen “I thought you were out today”, I finally got to my desk.

It took two frustrating hours to get around our own security measures and make the required change on the router. We had to create a dummy network and recreate the provider’s old network range, and set up a route between that and our real network. I won’t bore you with other technical snags I dealt with such as firewall rules and routing tables. I was getting increasingly frustrated at this point, on account of being at work on my day off, my own router keeping me out, and the provider changing stuff without telling us, and the idiot user who walked into our office in the middle of all this to ask a series of brain dead simple questions any 12 year old with a computer in their room would know, when all of a sudden our office filled with an unmistakable high pitch shrill of a fire alarm.

Apparently the fire marshal picked this morning to test the fire safety systems. I was already on the verge of a sensory overload at this point. Fire alarms cause me physical pain. This was more than I could bear.

I finished the configuration quickly and went back to the remote location to reinstall the router. Not so fast, said the Universe. There was a construction zone between my office and the remote building. The flagger had stopped the traffic and I ended up sitting there for 10 or 15 minutes unable to proceed or go back, knowing that the manager of the idle workers was already asking for my head. This was, naturally, all my fault, because this equipment is my responsibility.

I finally got to the remote building, more questionings and more hostile glares. I reinserted the router and turned it on. The internet connection came back, but VPN connection to our main office did not. Users could browse the Web, but they were unable to work without connectivity to the main building. This was something I could only repair from my office. So I drove back, again through the construction zone and more waiting and more frustration.

More boring technical details are omitted here, regarding IPSec tunnels and certification authorities, and a glitch I discovered in the router's management software. I got the connection to work finally, tested it quickly, confirmed that the users could do their jobs, and left.

It was past noon by now, and the fair morning had given way to a windstorm and heavy rain. So much for my plans for the day! The weather was so hostile I had no choice but to abandon the plans, to give up my day off essentially, and just go to Starbucks. On my way there I got stuck at another construction zone. I was fuming by now. Can’t I have one hour to myself, with a book and a cup of coffee????

When I finally made it to the Starbucks driveway and made a sharp left into it, I found it blocked by a forklift: more construction! They got out of the way quickly. So much the better, for if they had not I would have probably run over them.

There was no parking in front so I had to bravely ignore the towing signs and park on someone else’s property. At this point I just didn’t care. I paid, got my coffee, opened my book, and then discovered that every table in the shop was taken…

Tha sucks. I don't really know computers beyond the basics, but you seem to have had a taxing day. I know what those are like and its frustrating. A day like this I think I would be physically and mentally drained, and probably would even be suffering from a migraine.

That would absolutely be a depressing day for me ive had many well yknow the days where the world is out to get you and there are traps around every corner and you wish all of the stuff you had to put up with would be fine if it was all spead out through the week but these problems bombarded at you all in the course of 1 day can make me want to bite the head off my goldfish!! ( lol i have two fish i called 1 one and the other two...so if one dies i still have two!!) lol bad joke

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