Functionally ReTodded

So I finished packing about 12:30am Monday with an 8am flight. Smart? Of course not, but the Survivor finale was on, and I needed to see if Amanda won and if Amanda and Pavarti finally stopped hiding their feelings and got it on.

Suffice it to say I was shitteously disappointed on both counts.

In light of the fact that Atlanta’s airport is more fucked up than John Belushi on vacation in Bogota, I got up at 5am and was out of the house by 5:50am. 35 minutes to get to the airport, 15 to walk from Economy Parking and another ten to check in, so no worries for an 8:20am flight…right?

WRONG!

And I swear to god, these TSA people and the policies are retarded. I’m a fat, white 40 year old guy in shorts and flip flops. How sensitive is that magic wand if I made it go off?

Got on the ground at 9:30am, in the limo at 9:45 and at the hotel at 10:30am.

My first support call came at 10:10am, and I was fixing a laptop before I got to check in at the front desk.

Went up to my room and cleaned up, changed, and went back downstairs to start the upgrades.

I worked straight thru (minus an hour for beer, awesome hors d’ ouvres, and an inspirational speech) and it was back to the salt lick until 11pm.

I was fried, but a few beers seemed to help.  A few more did not.  I retired to my room, ordered a hamburger at 12:30, and was shocked to have it delivered by the strange man in the hotel uniform that was standing at the foot of my bed waving a check at me with a pen in the other hand.

Up at 6am (and feeling crappy, especially after the 12:31am hamburger) and in my cave by 7am. Work work work work work.

Nerd Alert

Late yesterday afternoon, a couple of users got their machines back and couldn’t login to the pc.  Not good.  By last night, there were roughly 25 percent of the machines we had touched that had the same issue.  Apparently the password or user cache purged somehow.  Now, with these people expected to present over the next two days, they had no computers and I had no answers (nor any possible explanation of what happened or why).

I notified our AD guys in the UK, and when I awoke refreshed at 7am today, we started working on the issue.

Back to last night.  I was totally fried, I had made one of my best friends at the company cry.  Not once either.  I’m guessing she cried half a dozen times.  Five months of data (as well as her presentation for today) was gone.  Sayonara.  As in off in the ether.

But, as is the rule here rather than the exception, many folks pulled together and cobbled her presentation back together from old emails, archives, etc.  I was proud(er) of where I work as well as the people yet again.

At 9pm I headed down for dinner poolside.  I got a beer, turned around and realized that the staff were clearing out the food.  I hurried to pile Tortolini, prime rib, garlic mashed new potatoes and caesar salad on my plate.  And some grouper (which I picked from the serving dish with my bare hands because someone had collected the tongs).

I ate, finished my beer, had one more, and headed off to my room.  No fanfare.  No one begging me to stay up late to get hammered, not that I would have considered it anyway.

At 9:50 I was in my room having an honor bar beer.  Oddly enough the beers at the bar cost the same as the honor bar.  So I could pay five bucks to stand in the lobby or pay five bucks to lay on the bed in my underpants and watch the 1979 Daytona 500 on ESPN classic.

I chose B.

And then I made a startling decision.  I shut off the lights and tv a little after ten and went to sleep.

Yes.  I went to sleep.  And I slept for over 9 hours.  It was heavenly.

Up in the morning to the sounds of British-sent emails with my team of AD folks across the pond working on a solution to my growing problem.  Ultimately, we did you usually do when something really bad and / or unexplainable happens.  We resorted to using 25 year old technology to solve the problem.

I had to create dial up connections on the affected machines, dial in to our Remote Access Server (RAS for short), and authenticate with our domain in the UK, then reboot, login as the user, reboot, login while not connected to anything.

All in all, the solution involved five people and about 40 man hours, but to the untrained eye, the solution took about two hours, and everyone was happy.

In light of that, I have spent the afternoon all but begging the marketing group to take me to dinner with them.

A) They’re the funniest group of all of them.

B)  They’re going to Morton’s.

C)  They love me.

So now I sit here.  Winding down, confirming hardware inventory information and other bookkeeping nonsense, and wait until 5pm at which time I will go change, maybe shower first, and have myself an honor bar beer.

I deserve it.