I Fought Technology and…I Won?! 2

I was having a bit of a frustrating day this morning, because I’m waiting on something and until I get approval, I can’t do anything, and I don’t know when I’m going to get approval.

But as the day went on, I got to fight with progressively more advanced forms of technology, and I kept winning (albeit with progressively more help). And in the end, I felt on top of the world.

The first bit was very simple: My car’s cupholder fell out, so I had to unscrew a piece of plastic from the dashboard, put it back together, and then screw it back in.

It took me about 20 minutes to figure out I had to unscrew the plastic, but once I did, I was able to fix the problem in about 30 seconds.

Then, I had to figure out how to get my iPod jury-rig to work again. I’ve blogged in a bit more detail about it before, but basically, some wires tore apart from the dock connector, and I was only getting sound out of the left speaker in my car.

So I got to go around to half the departments at work begging for a soldering iron, then once I found one of proper size, go back around and try to find someone who could a) operate said soldering iron and b) wasn’t terribly busy.

But I found a guy, and he soldered it and showed me how to so next time this happens I can solder it myself, and now it works perfectly. Hooray!

Finally, someone’s internet went down, and since I’m sort of the resident computer nerd, I went to test it with my work laptop, and I was like, ok, doesn’t work, we’ll call IT in the morning.

Then when I went back to my desk, my laptop wouldn’t reconnect to the internet, even though it was working fine all day.

So I borrowed another co-worker’s laptop to see if it was my station, and it wouldn’t work, and then HE couldn’t reconnect to the internet at his station.

We’d had some flakiness issues with the internet before, but I was like, fuck this, I’m sticking around until this shit is fixed.

Luckily, IT is on the 4th floor of our building, so I went up and started to bug people until I got someone to come down and take a look at stuff, and lo and behold, the problem was identified,* and it was fixed in about 30 seconds.

So now, the next time the internet starts to get flaky in the same manner, we can just call the guy and have him reboot something, and we’ll be back up and running.

I mean, I realize the last was more me harassing people until the problem was identified and fixed, but hey, the problem was identified and fixed because of me. I’m taking credit where I can here, people.

All I really care about is: Shit is fixed. And it all looks like it will remain fixed for a while. Huzzah!

*For the nerdy, the IP gateway kept refusing to issue more IP addresses because it wouldn’t recognize that people had logged off when they unplugged their computers. So if you didn’t unplug your computer’s internet connection, you were fine, because you’d already been issued a local IP address, but if you unplugged and then came back, it thought you were one more computer to add to the load, not the same computer coming back. Once they restarted the gateway, it cleared out and everyone got new IP addresses. Hopefully they’re going to replace the gateway, but at least we know who to call now.