Why So Difficult?!

Within the last 24 hours or so, everything seems to have been breaking. Everything. It started off with some minor problems at work last night. Nothing too catastrophic, though I did at one point get an error message I'd never seen before. (Six and a half years I've been working with this machine, and it still has the capacity to surprise me.)

Then, I was walking home from work yesterday morning, happily bopping along to Warren Zevon on my portable CD player, when suddenly the music just... stopped. Batteries must be dead, I thought. Hmm, that's odd. Usually it gives you a lot more warning than that. I tried pushing buttons for a while to see if I could make it work again. No dice. Oh, well. I shrugged my shoulders and kept on walking. A couple of minutes later, I realized that there was this really weird, very rapid clicking sound that appeared to be following me. I'd been vaguely aware of it for a little while, but had thought it was coming from somewhere farther off and surely had nothing to do with me. Well, nope. It was the CD player. So I opened it up, popped the disc out, and took a look. It wasn't too hard to figure out what was making the noise: the lens was vibrating back and forth so fast I half expected it to fly to pieces at any moment. I eventually had to yank the batteries out of it to get it to stop. I've no idea what might have caused that, but I'd be willing to bet that the "fix" is going to involve buying a new player.

Then, tonight I was watching Farscape, and, about halfway through Act I, the cable cut out. I'm just really glad I happened to have that particular episode already on tape elsewhere; "The Way We Weren't," wins my vote for "Best Season 2 Episode" against some extremely stiff competition and is definitely not an episode to miss. I'd really hoped to get a nice copy of it with the commercials zapped out, though. And copying tapes for people would be a lot easier if I actually had them all in order on one batch of tapes. (Not that Sci-Fi's scheduling hasn't already rendered that goal problematical. Guys, you know, there's a reason they decided not to use the original version of "Dream a Little Dream" as the season opener, and it works even less well in that capacity after they added the framing story to final version. Sheesh.)

Um, where was I? Oh, yeah, things breaking. So, OK, after not getting to watch the rest of the Farscape ep, I headed on into work. And I had to take a detour on the way, because the street I usually use was blocked by a host of vehicles with flashing lights. When I got into work, I was told that there'd been a power outage, which they'd only just recovered from. Apparently, somebody hit a power pole. Hmm, that must've been what the flashing lights were about. It might or might not explain the cable. Anyway, things were in a really messy state after the power loss. Some of the computers hadn't rebooted properly, and a little later, when I tried to look at my e-mail, I couldn't. (This was particularly annoying, because I was kind of in the middle of an extended e-mail conversation trying to sort out some problems I was having after a new software installation a few days ago, and I was interested to see what the relevant expert would have to suggest. Not a big deal, though. Certainly nothing that can't wait 'til Monday.) But everything we actually needed to do the essential part of our job seemed to be functioning, so I finished up the usual diagnostic self-test that gets run at shift changes and started 'er up. And... blooey. Wouldn't work. Apparently, we couldn't connect to one particular vitally needed computer. I went back and took a look at the stupid thing. It seemed to be functioning fine; it just wouldn't talk to us. Network problem, in other words. Nothing I can fix. Aaargh.

Fortunately, the next thing on our projects queue (somewhat unusually) was one that didn't actually need to use the stuff on the computer we can't connect to. And, hey, it's almost exactly one shift's worth of stuff. (Longer, probably, given overhead and any potential delays caused by the more normal sort of problems.) So I figured I'd skip down and run that, instead. It took me about ten minutes to get everything ready to go for it and get it started up, compared to the probably-several-hours it'd take to get hold of the computer people and for them to wake up, come in, figure out what the problem is, and fix it. I figure, as long as I can accomplish a full shift's worth of what I need to accomplish, anything else can wait until morning. (Mind you, normally I'd call my supervisor and consult him on something like this, but he's on vacation at the moment, so I guess it's up to me to make the command decisions. If I really wanted to pass the buck, I could call my boss' boss and wake her up, but I really don't see any point.) Amazingly enough, this strategy does seem to be working. So far.

I'm just seriously hoping that nothing else breaks for the rest of the night.

(Oh, and while I'm thinking about it: 50 trivia points for anybody who can tell me where the title of this post came from!)