I suppose since this is my first post, I should do a bit of explaining about myself. In short, I'm a 27-year-old female nerd. If that thought makes you gag or involuntarily shiver, leave now. Go ahead. I won't be offended. Much.
Oh, you've stayed. My day has been made. Well then, I guess you may be interested in bit more information. Considering that you've been kind enough to stay, I think I should oblige. I'm a first-year library school grad student who currently runs a music library branch. I have just reached the point in which the freshmen have started to address me as "ma'am" and I'm very quick to shake me head saying, "Please don't do that."
I love to dance, although I'm not great at it. My boyfriend is skilled in ballroom and swing dances. He is the primary reason other dancers think I dance well. I love Harry Potter and have attended a conference centered around this fandom. Charity and activism are passions of mine as I preside over a local chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance. I'm a musician with a specialization in opera and a love of all genres. I am proud to call myself a Nerdfighter.
Now, with that out of the way, I can tell you the basic purpose of this blog. Primarily, this is for a technology class that requires two posts a week. It appears that we can make this about ourselves, but we need to incorporate something about information technology. As IT is an extremely broad topic, I should be able to have some good ol' fun with this. While I cannot guarantee brilliant writing skills, I can promise quirky tech stories and a lot of sarcasm.
On to the IT portion of the post. Friends, we are going to start with all-important Internet Service Provider or ISP, for short. It is shortened so that when they screw up, cursing them extensively is less of a tongue twister. Our local company has been known to switch the wrong cable in the apartment complex's box, cutting my connection, and reset the connection while I'm at work so that nothing at home functions until I reset both the modem and the router...repeatedly.
So, I wasn't surprised on Tuesday when I returned from a crazy day at work (that may be a different post) to a non-functioning wireless network. After resetting everything about 3 times, my Airport Express was still somberly blinking its yellow distress light. Frustrated, I sat down at my computer to check the neighbor's network - they have it open for some reason and don't mind if I join occasionally. It too was down. I reconnected to my network and reloaded my browser just to see if I had developed any Jedi internet powers. (This is the network you're looking for.)
To my amazement, a page popped up prompting me to activate my account. Activate my account? I'd been a paying customer for 3 years! I picked up the phone and called the shining example of ISP vindictiveness - customer service. My only solace in this is that I have discovered how to bypass the insult-to-anyone's-intelligence AI tech help and get a real person within 10 minutes. You can do this, too. Simply repeat "representative" for 10 minutes. The AI will ask you repeatedly if you're sure you want a real person. Don't be fooled; it doesn't have feelings yet.
Luckily, the representative I reached seemed to already know the problem I was having. I explained that based on my work, the issue must be on their end. With barely a pause, she informed me cheerily that the servers for my area of the state were down.
"Down?"
"Yes, the snow storm knocked a few of them out."
"Wait, but its not snowing here?"
"It is here and let me tell you these two inches have really made things difficult."
"Two inches? Where are you?"
"Atlanta. Two inches is a lot here."
"I'm sure, but two inches in Atlanta knocked out the servers for Virginia?"
"Yes, I'm really not looking forward to driving home tonight."
*sigh* "Well, ok. So, what's the estimated repair time?"
"About 8 hours. Maybe four. Unfortunately, I'm not being updated frequently."
Apparently, she had been telling customers 4 - 8 hours for several hours. I'm haven't figured out how two inches of snow crashed enough servers to disconnect a good chunk of Virginia. And while I understand that servers take time to repair, shouldn't they have a back-up system of some sort? I mean, if the majority of a state is dependent on a small group of servers, shouldn't you develop a contingency plan for that? Forget the snow, Georgia frequently gets hurricanes. Surely, they would have a plan for that? Or not. Obviously not.
The servers did manage to come back up much later that night. Certainly, too late for me to work off some stress blasting Klingons in a Federation fleet, but just early enough for me to say, "Oh, look, the green light is on," and crawl into bed.
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