Technological and other fun

The CDL got to hear my rants today, but I thought I'd share with everyone else as well. Hey, I'm starting to feel hormonal, and I'm having to be good at work at present. I'm so helpful and keen, I'm making myself sick. Anyways, technology hates me right now. It all started the other night:

• Bigpond internets go down, at least in Canberra. No notification on their status website. Eventually the next day there's an admission that some business customers nationwide are affected. Damn, when will I get my business-quality connection then? Intarwebs back when I get home from work yesterday.
• (That evening I had a massive dream about David Hasselhoff having hot buttsecks with Wolverine. And I found it disturbing  that Wolverine was on the bottom. What was this saying about me?)
  
• Yesterday I decided to take my car into work so I could look at a house at lunchtime. I leave it parked outside so that I can just hop in the next morning. It is very cold. Car won't start. Nice NRMA man tells me that the fuel pump seems to be not too well. Car booked in for replacement pump on Friday - and gets me to the houseviewing fine.
• Once I finally get into the office after having my car started, I find my PC won't talk to the network. After assorted faffing about, uninstalling and reinstalling the network drivers (the ones on the local disk), it all works. Only took me over 1/2 an hour to figure out a strategy (after bothering Networks because I thought the port was down).
• (When I was bored during the morning, I fired up Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, only to find the first article to be all about the Hoff. Ahhhhh! I'm going to start wearing tinfoil hats).
  
• CEO has Blkberi hassles. Fixed.
• My watch stops responding to button presses, and the alarm hadn't actually gone off first thing. Still reporting correct time. I went out and impulse-bought another watch, and it's pants. Only one alarm, and I should have tried it on. Duh. I want one of these. Still, it only has two alarms, and I like having seven (most of which I never use, of course). I should try and get my current one fixed. Again.
• I cleverly set my phone alarm so I'd wake up this morning, and it worked fine. However, after making a cuppa and toast and warming my toes in bed for a bit, I managed to tip about 100ml of sweet milky tea on top of my phone. It was in its case, but I found that it isn't the slightest bit waterproof. The display was foggy, and most of the buttons didn't work. However, sometime after midday today, it seems to be better again. Screen almost completely clear and the buttons are doing hot pressing action. Thank god.
• I haven't been brave enough to go into the server room yet. I'm reminded of that young woman in Victorian times who lived in a mill town and applied for one of the new jobs with the Spinning Jenny. Apparently when she walked into the factory, each one of the hundreds of strands of yarn parted at the same time. Since it took an appreciable amount of time to reset the loom when only one strand broke (they used to leave the job until several needed to be done), unfortunately she didn't get the job. I don't want to walk into the server room to have the breakers all flip or something equally disasterous.

On the "if only it were amusing" front, my new boss-to-be came up to hasslediscuss things with me and my current boss about the new arrangments - the email team being in the applications and SAP area rather than with the rest of the system-systems. She was making mostly the right noises, but she wasn't happy that my boss was away that day. She was "aware of his concerns" and she wants "an opportunity to bring him on board". Ooops. I piped up and said I wasn't really across the "synergies" (I didn't actually parrot the term which was given in the promotional bumf) we are supposed to be having with this particular aspect of the rearrangements, and perhaps we'd be a little more comfortable with it if we were aware of the rationale. At least she had the grace to admit she didn't know what the rationale was.

There were also some interesting words about my supervisor-to-be being very "output-focussed", and being "my support". I've worked with the supervisor-to-be in a peripheral way, and I think she's very good at her stuff... but the implication of her being boss-lady's little groupie had my alarm bells ringing. Well, who knows. Perhaps boss-lady one of those types whom if you tackle in just the right way, she loves you, but if you put a foot wrong, it's WWIII. My auntie is like that, and I think I recognise the symptoms. I sense a much less relaxed working environment in my immediate future. Great, 20+% drop in pay and more stress. And  during all that I noticed her checking out the condition of my desk, which was unfortunately even more untidy than usual. Fuck.