Work Travails May 1, 2006
Posted by Enas Yorl in Home.trackback
Dave at Garfield Ridge relates his first day on his new job here. Poor guy. We have interns to do that sort of thing.
As for me, I had to do some edits today to a Big Presentation that my team will give next Wednesday to some analysts from other departments and a couple members of the Wigness of Bigness club in the organization. About 3/4ths of the way through, I opened up an earlier version of this presentation to snag a graphic from it. Unfortunately by doing so I reached some sort of PowerPoint critical mass where a singularity was created that destroyed not only the presentation I was working on, but PowerPoint itself! It's true! I couldn't open up PowerPoint at all. I called into our tech support line and the gal that answered was very helpful, but she had her problems dealing with the Singularity. First she tried to repair PowerPoint. Didn't take. Reinstall? Nope. Desparation move: she installed an earlier version of PowerPoint. Success! Yea, verily I can shuffle slides again! Okay, but my presentation is still one with the Singularity. At 60+ slides it took a lot of time and effort to put together. Very fortunately, our IT department makes frequent backups of the common network storage areas and I was able to reinstate a version from last week. Still, several hours of work went down the tubes. I was probably about as productive today as Dave was with his hole-punching.
Happy May-Day!
Some computers have a malevolent intelligence and vicious sense of humor. Some are pure evil.
Elzbth, you may be right about that. Generally though I’m the one banishing the Ghosts in the Machine. For years I’ve been the diviner of “funny messages” (error codes) and the local office non-official “tech support”. I’ve exorcised many a lesser demon by my mere proximity to the afflicted system. It seems that the Machine Collective dispatched a higher captain to devil me. Today, the Singularity ensnared the other version of the presentation I resurrected from the backup system. I had to recall the backup from yesterday’s version to finish my edits today. I saved it in a completely different network location. Hopefully that will end this problem. Huh, why do I suddenly hear ominous music in the background?
You hear ominous music? Well, whatever you do, do NOT go down into the basement alone.
Speaking as a person who can unintentionally invite greater demons by my mere proximity to any computer system, I wish you well.