Incoherent Babble

Yeah, once really wasn’t enough. On the 2 hour car ride down Thursday, Jeff and I were talking. At one point, we both just glance at each other and exchange one of those “I have a bad feeling about this” moments. Everything was planned out to the letter, we’d tested everything on our end, and we predicted smooth sailing. In and out by lunch.

WRONG!

We walk into the HR department, and are told everyone is in their conference room. As we walk down the hall, they shout out at us “You’re not going to be happy!”… We walk in and sit down to meet everyone and go over our game plan, only to find out that the entire campus (this is a hospital BTW) was down this morning with networking problems.

We groan and I trudge off to find an office to occupy for the morning, and check to see that the internet is up at the moment, so everything I need should be good to go. After reading their helpful company intranet page, I find out that they’re still having some issues at their remote data center, and are trying to get some of their servers back up, which are still having problems after the outages. No biggy, all I need is a ‘net connection anyway.

Welp, I spend my time from 10:15 to about 11:30 trying to get our VPN client to connect properly. I even go as far as pulling out my laptop and jumping on their ever-ready visitor wireless connection to make sure everything’s A-OK at home. Next we call up their helpdesk and get in touch with the desktop person that logged me in as an administrator so I could install the software in the first place. I start blabbering out stuff about my suspicions that it was their firewall blocking access, since I was able to connect just fine using my laptop over wireless. It doesn’t take me long to realize that she doesn’t have a clue what the hell I’m talking about. She does desktops, and I’m sure she does them very well, but firewalls and routing just aren’t her area. In our small company, we all have at least a vague idea of what’s going on, but it’s not fair to expect that from people at a company employing thousands across the state.

After about 15 minutes and no return phone call, we call the desktop girl again. She says she checked, and that she doesn’t think there should be any firewall issues preventing us from connecting, but says she can’t get anyone to help us right now, because they’re all still going ape-shit over network problems at the data center that have services down for multiple hospital campuses.

To be continued…