Chris Meller

Well, Pay day is always a good day. After all, how could it not be?

So anyway, not a bad day. There were no major problems, just a few follow up ones. The only major thing was our old ISP going down and taking Joe’s DNS with it, which kept everyone from accessing our stuff as well.

I talked to Joe several times today. I always love interacting with the guys at ACS. They’re such total idiots and really don’t have a clue what is going on with their own equipment. They’re a lot like BellSouth, only without any professionalism at all. The first 2 hours and 4 phone calls are always spent trying to convince them that we’ve actually done everything we can do to check and make sure everything on our end is actually working properly. After that, we never actually get any type of admission of guilt, we just somehow eventually get them to fix everything. In between, we only get yelled at for messing with the equipment they say is working fine, simply trying to fix the problem in a more timely manner than they’re addressing the issue.

Eventually they said that they would send Greg out tomorrow, but he was out at Clemson all morning and wouldn’t be able to get back until after 1:00. So, Joe and I proceeded as if the internet were never going to come back up. This involved Joe setting up some external DNS with a 3rd party provider, which meant he needed copies of all his DNS stuff from the machines he couldn’t access himself.

In the end, everything worked out alright. Joe was up until about midnight keying in all those DNS entries, but other than that, nothing terribly eventful.

As you can probably guess just from the title, today wasn’t exactly the best in the record books.

I walk in, only about 10 minutes late (which is about as close to being on time as I ever get), and sit down at my desk to try and learn about the phone crap I’m supposed to be an expert at now. I get about 45 minutes worth of work done, when someone comes over and asks Matt a question that I can’t hear (he’s our web developer by the way) and they both leave.

A few minutes later, Matt comes back and tells me that she has one of the biggest spyware infestations he’s ever seen. I tell him I’ll go take care of it in a minute, already perturbed that she had bothered him with something that has nothing to do with his field of expertise or job description.

After another few minutes, Matt comes back and asks if we have Ad Aware downloaded on the network somewhere. I tell him yes, that it’s out there with everything else, but that give me a minute and I’ll go install it, that I’m trying to make a point, that I’ve been ignored on the spyware issue several times already just this year, and that it’s a very big issue that no one cares about but me (since I’m the only one that has to waste his time going around cleaning it all up all over the building).

Matt says ok and disappears again. Another few minutes later, he comes back and says that he went ahead and installed Ad Aware anyway, but that my point is in no danger of being overlooked. Well, even though I didn’t believe him at the time, it turns out it was true. Not only was it the biggest spyware infestation I’d ever seen, anywhere, but it was also almost 3x our previous record. After 3 scans with Ad Aware, 2 reboots of the machine, and 897 infected items later, I left the machine thinking my task was done and it was now safe to finally go to lunch.

Matt and I went to Baileys, as per usual. I actually legitimately won the last game. It’s amazing how well I can actually do when I take my time, line up my shot, and make a very controlled execution of my plan.

Anyway, after lunch, we stopped by Liquid Highway, as is our typical daily routine. Alecia was working again. She was the one that came out and took our order, and also made my coffee and handed it to us when she was done. This was the first time I’d really seen her in a semi-peaceful and private environment since Matt and Byron noticed the ring.

Which brings me to another disturbing thought. Matt and Byron were wondering if Alecia had always had the ring on her finger, since they’d never noticed it before. At first, I thought it was just that normally she was making the coffee and generally didn’t wear it. Unfortunately, several times lately she has had it on when she was making coffee. This has been greatly depressing for me, but I’m not really sure what to do about it. Waitresses in general are tough to ask out (as we learned from Katie last week), but Alecia would be much more difficult, considering I don’t have an entire meal to try and talk to her. No, I’m not that lucky. I only have a few minutes, at most, not to mention that generally I’m also with at least Matt (if not Byron too), and that there are generally many other people in line and working at Liquid Highway too.

Anyway, I’ve babbled on far longer about this than I really intended, so on with the story of my day. After lunch, just as we walk through the door, I see Jeff walking out of our area back to his desk. He sees me and flags me down. He says the machine I was working on earlier still isn’t working and appears to be just about the same as it was. Now, just when I was starting to eel a tad bit better about the day, God decides to piss down upon my life once again.

With great disgust, I growl something about formatting it, and starting fresh, because I’m tired of wasting my time working on it. So, for the rest of the afternoon, I wasted most of my time re-i9nstalling everything.

To top the afternoon off, I also couldn’t figure out my problem with the phone server that recently became my problem, but I also had to finish the desktop I started on Friday, get interrupted three times while trying to learn the phone stuff, explain myself to three different bosses (no, no Office Space pun there, total truth), and run across the building to solve a problem that I could have very simply answered from my desk in less than 10 seconds if the person had simply given me all the information the first time (do they actually expect “It doesn’t work” to really help me diagnose a real problem?).

So, in what was supposed to be a short recap of my day from hell, you now know why I may have been in such a bad mood.

In actuality, my day wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if we actually did things properly. For example, if we actually disciplined the Customer Service employee that couldn’t work all day because she’d gotten her computer so infested with spyware. After all, you don’t get infested by spyware by browsing to websites for medical facilities (which would be the only ones that should be viewed on company time if that company is an insurance company). Even if we didn’t fire someone, but simply reprimanded them, at least that would be something. Or maybe if we actually enforced rules about people constantly disturbing the IT guys by walking into their cubes whenever they have the slightest problem. Why not just write an email or give us a call? Why? Because that means you might not get the instant results you seem ot get if you walk over and bother them in person. Never mind that we always answer our phones and prefer email to anything, simply because it doesn’t require any physical human interaction.

The one last thing of any interest today was picking up a refill for my prescription. The pharmacy we go to used to be a bank, so you can just drive up to the window, put our co pay in the drawer, and pull out the bottle when they pass it back out. The entire process took, at most, 2 minutes, including the guy in the window asking if I minded him forging my signature on the form.

Blah, anyway, I’m done ranting and rambling about things that neither concern, nor likely interest anyone but myself. So, now that I have finished off my day, I’ll let everyone go.

I really need to learn that “Blog” means SHORT entries about day-to-day life.

Well, I picked Michael up at GSP this morning at 10:30. It was really amazing that I was even up that early on a weekend. As I kept pointing out to him every time he was afraid he was abusing our friendship asking me to follow him somewhere, normally I wouldn’t wake up until 2:30, at the very earliest, so anything I accomplished before then was just making my life a little less pointless.

When I woke up at about 10:00, I almost freaked out. I’d actually set the alarm for 9:00 the night before. Unfortunately, after setting it (as I was getting into bed at 2:30 that morning), I totally forgot to actually turn the alarm on. In any case, I actually made it to the airport about 10:45. Even thought his flight was actually supposed to get in at 10:26 (why 26? They can’t just round like a normal person?), they were running late, so it all really worked out well despite my blunder.

Our first stop was, of course, at work. We picked up his bike and started running his last set of errands in town. After dropping off his old neighbor’s key and a library book at the library I’ve never once been to, we headed towards Easley to get some lunch before the church crowd set in and then drop off the bike at its new temporary home.

Michael treated me to a lunch at Ruby Tuesdays. I didn’t even know there was on in Easley, but apparently there is. As per usual, I had to get my New Orleans Seafood. It’s really weird. Lately, I seem to quickly go from a “normal” hungry state to an incredibly upset “acid eating away at my inner organs” upset stomach “I never want to see a piece of food again” kind of disgust. Who knows, maybe I really anorexic and I just don’t consciously realize it.

Anyway, it was such an incredibly nice day today. With a high of 76 degrees and totally sunny, we both had just a great time riding around the country back roads around Easley on the way to Coop’s house. You wouldn’t believe some of the amazing houses in that area. Most of them are at least 3x the size of ours, and ours isn’t exactly shabby.

Coop’s amazing in and of himself. Aside form all the amazing robotics stuff and other computer stuff he does, he also makes a fortune and it shows. In his driveway he has a brand new VW Passat-ish thing. Talk about sporty..600-horse-power Trans Am parked next to it. Being the geek he is, he has a home-made solar panel in the windshield of the Trans Am that plugs into the cigarette lighter to keep the battery charged while he isn’t driving it.

Michael tried to give me a ride on the bike, but while we were going up the grassy hill next to Coop’s driveway, Michael made too sharp of a turn and we fell. Everyone was fine, and the bike suffered only a minor scratch on its left tail light, but it freaked me out enough to stay off the bike until after we left. I would eventually still like to learn to ride a bike and a horse. Hey, don’t laugh. When Planet of the Apes comes true, I’ll be the one galloping on ahead of you on the big ass horse, leaving you for the crazy monkeys. Anyway, on with the day.

Let’s see, after the bike (and playing with all of Coop’s cool stuff for about an hour), we headed back to work by way of Liquid Highway.

Unfortunately, Alecia doesn’t work on weekends (and I’d only seen her like once, maybe twice that past week anyway) so it was less enjoyable than I’d hoped.

Back at work, Michael checked his email briefly and checked a few phone-related things, after which we installed some software on a new desktop I didn’t finish setting up on Friday, then we did a test restart of the phone server, just to make sure everything still worked fine and that I could handle it.

After we wrapped that up it was back to the airport for dinner at the bar (you’d be surprised how good their clam chowder is) before he shipped out.

So my day wasn’t the most exciting, but it was quite possibly the last day I’ll ever see Michael again, so I wanted to makes sure it was at least remembered in all its hum-drum-ness.

Let’s just say it fits my mood and the trend my life has been taking today. Not only did I find out the cute coffee chick was already ringed (see: Coffee + Love != Win [incoherentbabble.com]), but when I went out to dinner with Michael (he’s trying to get in some personal time with everyone before he leaves for Iraq at the end of the week), he and his friend convinced me to ask out our waitress, whom I went to high school with, and I got turned down.

So all-in-all, not the most stellar of days. I’d say my mood is somewhere between rotten and suicidal. And listening to “All Out of Love” (originally by Air Supply. thank you Van Wilder!) probably isn’t helping matters.

Maggie called about 10:30 last night, just as I was getting ready to go to bed. She and Lego are home from USC on Spring Break, and they’d decided to go see one of our old high school teachers, and she wanted to invite me.

First off, she asked when I was working today, which just kinda surprises me. I work full-time, 8 - 5, just like I have for EVERY DAY FOR THE PAST 2 YEARS!

I did, however, decide to randomly go and just go into work late this morning. I meant to send Michael an email letting him know, but it turns out it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. While we were in the school, I got a call (since cell phones don’t really work, probably intentionally, in the building) that was garbled. All I made out was that it was the follow me feature on our phone system, someone trying to track me down. Since I didn’t hear the name, I assumed someone would call my cell directly if they really needed me.

When we got out of the school, I called Michael’s cell, only to find out that he was driving back from Charlotte, and wasn’t at work either. He said he’d just talked to Jeff a few minute previous, and nothing had been mentioned about a problem, so I decided everything must be alright and went to breakfast with Meeke and Lego.

As we were walking into Bojangles, my mom called, and said they were having a problem getting their email. I figured it must just be an isolated problem, since again; no one had given me a call yet. As I left Bojangles, I called Ron’s cell, only to find out that yes, they were all having a problem with email, and they were in the process of restarting the Exchange server, which fixed the problem. Oh well, it all worked out.

Anyway, back to the school. I go there a few minutes before Maggs and Lego did, so I went on inside when I saw some old friends walking in. Andrea was one of them (yeah, she’s one of the other girls I’m more or less obsessed with lately). I got a hello and a goodbye hug from her, which was nice, because she’s normally paranoid about people touching her.

A few minutes later, I saw Maggie and Lego coming in, so we ran off to see Youngblood. We shocked the hell out of him, and had a good conversation. He was pissed about Enterprise being canned as well, and we traded all the rumors we’d heard about the end of the season. He kicked us out when class began, but I also got a hug from Jackie (aside from the coffee cutie, she’s the other big one I’m obsessed with lately, and lives a block away from me). Apparently she and her boyfriend have finally broken up (he was a total loser and didn’t deserve her anyway). Maybe that means there’s actually a chance with her, given my failures with “Alecia” recently (see entry “Coffee + Love != Win” [incoherentbabble.com]). One can only hope.

It was really weird being back in the old high school, having been out of it for several years now. I was standing around, hoping I didn’t see my brother anywhere. All the freshmen were so little. Very scary.