the week that wouldn't die
Overall this week hasn't been bad, perse. Its just been very long and very tiring.
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I spent Wednesday & Thursday in the city attending my employer sponsored customer advisory council. Overall it wasn't too bad of an experience. I got to meet some of our customers in person, and had some constructive conversations with them. Thank jebus we had wifi in the conference room, so I was able to surf the net, and be productive as countless dull presentations occured. The hotel was pretty swank. I'm not sure what the name of the style of decorating they used is, but it was very loud, and in your face. Lots of bold colors. The food was pretty decent too. I ended up skipping the company dinner the first night because the conference session ended at 5PM, but dinner wasn't scheduled to start until 7:30PM. I was exhausted, and didn't have anything to do for 2.5 hours. I ended up getting home at about 6PM.<br />
The second day was much like the first. I actually was on my way out at 5PM when the VP of Sales cornered me and asked me to meet with two guys from Delta Airlines who were early in the sales process. So I introduced myself, and answered a slew of Support-related questions, and then sat there, virtually ignored, for the next 30 minutes as they chewed the fat with the sales drone. Eventually I just pretended that my cell phone was ringing just so that I could escape. I got home at nearly 7PM.<br />
Denise went out of her way to make a really nice dinner, but unfortunately I was so tired, and not at all hungry, that i kinda ruined it. She made pork chops in orange juice in the crock pot, and was planning to make thai pad noodles with it. She also made lemon-raspberry sorbet, but it wasn't quite frozen enough so i'll try it tonight.<br />
So I had the misfortune of being on call this past week, and it was actually an uneventful week until last night at 1AM when I received a call from a complete psycho. This guy ran into some bizarro problem with something he downloaded off of <A HREF="http://sourceforge.net">SourceForge.net</a>, and then assumed that sourceforge.net was the same as SourceForge the product, and called in at 1AM to complain. So i was awakened from a fairly deep sleep, and did my best to explain to this idiot that he had the wrong number, and that he needed to submit his issue on the sourceforge.net website. At that point he went off the deep end, and dove into a long profanity laced rant. I hung up on him, because this wasn't my problem at all, and I certainly didn't need to hear some nut job yelling at me at 1AM. Well, apparently I hurt his sense of machismo, and he promptly called back. I suspected it was him, and let it go to voicemail, at which point he left a series of three vulgar, threatening, profane voice messages totalling nearly 15 minutes on my cell phone. About every other word was fuck, and this nutcase alternated between a foaming at the mouth lunatic, and a cras infantile loser. I saved all three messages, and my employer's legal dept is now investigating. If they can track down this person's phone number from the company phone switch, then they might turn the matter over to the FBI. So that was my fun for last night.<br />
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Today the hardware in our 'fusion' server died again. More accurately, it was yesterday, but no one noticed until today. I've called the vendor in yet again, but he is at a loss to explain why the memory continues to produce fatal errors that lock up the server. Last month he swapped out the motherboard. Today he tried swapping out the RAM, but that didn't resolve the POST error:
Missing or damaged memory in slot(s) 2A, 2B
So he claims that he'll be calling Intel (the motherboard OEM) for advice. I'm very close to telling him that I want a new box. I'm sick of the aggravation of having sales complain that the box is down, and various folks in engeering annoy me.