Domo Arigato, Mr Oboto...

The hits keep coming. The One just blasted Wall Street bankers for taking huge bonuses, saying that they should be more prudent and fiscally responsible. The guy is going to authorize almost a trillion in new spending in his first two weeks in the job, and he's calling for frugality.

Credit where it's due, the man has balls.

Heh. Hah. Bwa ha ha ha!

This is called foreshadowing. Or hope and change. Or something.

O, the Irony

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children all of all ages, your bald, rotund, smartassed host is back. I haven't posted in a long, long time, but today something happened to bring me out of retirement.

I recently moved from a user support role to a network support role at work. Less travel, better pay, lots of Cisco. Challenging and cool. But, it seems, no matter what one does, the human element will always remain.

I got a request to look at the network equipment at one of our sites. The social service side of our business is frequently....interesting to work with. Everyone has to have a new PC, or IP phones, interoperability, security, they are saving the world and their job requires it! Sadly, there is never any money.

There are a few cottages at this site for residents. 5 cottages in all, a PC or two in each one. The main facility is moving to IP phones, so the chance came about to get these small buildings wired and joined to the network. To save funds, the smaller cottages were wired in a ring. That is, the cables go from the main building to the first cottage, and around in a circle. If anything happens in the main building, or one of the first parts of the ring, service for the rest goes down.

Not ideal, but cost effective. As I am sure you have guessed, the network went down. So, I go to the first cottage, get a ladder (of course the cabinets are 8 feet up), jack into the switch, reboot, check the config...yep. Everything is good here, on to the next one.

At the next cottage, I checked in with the desk, and headed back to the room that houses the network equipment. My all-day project had come to a close in a flash. Dangling impotently against the wall was the plug for the Cisco switch. Even though there were 5 other outlets in the room, someone decided that they were going to iron some clothes, and unplugged the switch to plug the iron in. One of the available choices was the outlet two inches above where the switch was plugged in. Sigh.

Since last Friday, a couple people were less able to do their jobs, and had no network connections. On the plus side, a differently abled individual probably has some pretty sharp pleats.