Today’s featured image is a shot that I took of the cat house on my deck on December 9th. It began snowing on the morning of the 8th and continued for about 24 hours, leaving an ecstatic Atlanta populace to deal with four to eight inches of the white stuff. I think the last time I saw that kind of accumulation down here was probably in the early 90’s. My car and I had no problems with it – in fact, I almost enjoyed driving home on Friday night because pretty much everyone else in the city had panicked and gone home at about 1:00 Friday afternoon. The roads were nearly empty. The snow hung around on the ground for several days, but was pretty much gone by last Wednesday (the 13th). It has remained pretty chilly, however. Mid-30s this morning.
Memphis. Someday, I’ll laugh about Memphis. If you go back and read my last post, detailing what the plan was for Memphis, you’ll see the difference between a plan and reality at the X-Company:
Plan – Add machines to the domain and install anti-virus software from my hotel room on Sunday night. Reality – All of the machines, including the domain controller, were offline on Sunday night. I ate a sandwich and watched television from my hotel room on Sunday night.
Plan – Down day at the office on Monday. I’d go in, set up the new network, put work on machines and printers. Get things ready for Tuesday. Reality – Got to the office at about 7:30 and there was no power. Power remained out for about 4 hours. Down day never happened, as everyone came in to the office and wanted to work. Not only could they not do that because of the power situation, but they weren’t supposed to be there at all. When the power came back on, they all tried to work while I kept telling them to stop working so that I could set them up. Disaster of a day.
Plan – Train the users on Wednesday, then help out with individual problems on Wednesday and Thursday, come home Thursday night, prepare to go back for the office move on the following Monday. Reality – I did go through the training presentation with the users, but it did not go well because the X-Company was having a full-blown crisis. Users were getting locked out left and right, email wasn’t working, provisioning users (unlocking their accounts) was hanging up everywhere…we basically were dead in the water. I spent most of the day trying to assure users that no, things didn’t usually suck this badly. By late in the day, I’d gotten most of the users up and working and had their printers set up. Then the firm admin – a network guy from Chattanooga – arrived at the Memphis office and announced that we’d be moving to the new office in 20 minutes. This was Wednesday (planned for the following Monday, remember?). So I grabbed the firewall and domain controller and moved them to the new office to get set up there. With movers running around and people trying to determine where to set up, I basically locked myself in the network closet and got my domain controller and firewall plugged in, then went home early. Got back to the office on Thursday to help people get started and discovered that the network guy had changed the network scope – so I had to reconfigure the domain controller and all of the printers. I did this. 20 minutes later, he tried to set up the phones and ended up killing the entire network. A vital piece of hardware had failed in the network closet and it couldn’t be replaced until the following day. So I left at around 4:00 and came home.
Plan – Go back to Memphis on Sunday and help users settle in to the new office until Wednesday. Reality – I went back to Memphis on Sunday, and ran the anti-virus setup on machines that I’d missed the previous week, then went to the office on Monday morning, where everything was actually running pretty smoothly. Helped some users with little problems, tweaked some printer settings, was just getting into a good groove….and power for the entire block went out. I informed my office, then, after sitting around for a few hours without power, I texted my boss and asked, “What am I supposed to be doing here? They’re doing fine (when they have power) and there’s no moving going on (remember that was the plan).” He agreed that I didn’t need to be there, and decided (I don’t know why) that I should go to Chattanooga instead and help the people in that (much larger) office until Wednesday.
So I left Memphis and drove to Chattanooga. Spent Tuesday and Wednesday there, fighting a losing battle against people getting locked out of their accounts (because of settings from their former domain that kept throwing out bad credentials), and escaped on Wednesday night.
Oh, yeah – it was also decided to make me the primary consultant for this firm after all of this. So I’ve not got thirteen firms and something like 600 users. Two of those firms are having a terrible time getting anything done because, I suspect, they weren’t setup correctly.
I am buried in tickets. Normally, I like to carry 8-10 open tickets. I currently have over 60. I need for this year to be over.