03/15/05 Tuesday

This hasn't been my week for computers. Already this week I've spent an hour+ on the phone w/ my service provider, who kindly backpeddaled after first telling me to call the router people & ended up walking me through a complete disconnect, reconnect & reboot of every piece of equipment I own (in the correct order).. God Bless him! I spent a couple of hours last night trying to wiggle my way through some formatting changes on my Blog.. got links to work. YEAH! Got links to look better & stop hurting my eyes. YEAH! Got links to appear at the top of the sidebar instead of the bottom. YEAH! Can't get a pic to load right. Crap. Too much to hope for for one day.. shoulda stopped while I was ahead! Significant sense of accomplishment for me on those bits, tho -- all of you who know how to code, bite me. I'm a neophyte, don't know a damn thing, and figured 85% of it out on my friggin' own. (Big fat thank yous to the one person who did take time out to help!)

Today it's my work laptop that isn't connecting... and the disconnect, reconnect & reboot routine didn't work its magic, either. I started swapping cables around to see if it's the cable, the router, the modem, or the computer... and since everything works fine on my own PC, my guess is that it's the laptop. So I call our HELP desk. Once they hear what the error message is, my 'helper' promptly tells me they can't do anything with a VPN & transfers me to another dept before I can finish telling them I have no Inet connection at all. (Ya gotta have an Inet connection before the VPN will work in the first place.) That "other dept" turns out to be in FL, and the schmo there was unbelievably snotty, obviously bored with his job & thought I was an idiot before he ever heard the sound of my voice. Still thinks so after hearing the entire schpiel & says I gotta have an Inet connection first. Loooooong waiting silence on both sides. Don't they have time standards? Ok... Very very nicely, I ask him to please tell me what to do next... he says call my internet service provider. I explain to him that it really shouldn't be the cable company, since I have full & functional connectivity on my personal PC sitting right here. I explain again that I've swapped all the cables back & forth, everything works fine on mine, just not on the laptop. Snothead tells me again that I should call the internet service provider. Or maybe our Helpdesk. I guess he wasn't aware it was our helpdesk that transferred me to him in the first place? I asked where he was, & he said "Florida". Figures. Our own great IT guys who drop everything to help us, say "hi", & smile at us in the hallways are getting outsourced one by one & in their place I get some dick from FL who obviously neither appreciates nor enjoys the job he's got. He wanted to know WHY it "figures", but I could hear the eager snide-ity in his voice, figured we'd've ended up saying some things I'd rather not have recorded, so I thanked him for his time & hung up. Called the Helpdesk back, and after running through every step I've already taken... TWICE... Clueless guy (nice, but maybe multitasking one too many things) asks me if I've tried changing the cables around. Again I run through it. Please, Mr. Clueless guy, just put a ticket out there for me & I'll draaag myself all the way into STL so our nice friendly happy guys there can show me what idiot thing I've done wrong now. Got a ticket #, putting on my shoes.... Screw it. I just know there's something simple I can try here before going all the way in there & wasting the rest of the day. I'm calling Brad. Shoulda done that in the first place.