Apologies to the People Who Futilely Checked This Over and Over Again

This is my first real chance to post since the weekend, so I'd better make it good. Let me whinily explain why I've been such a bad blogger this week. It actually starts with vacation last week -- specifically, the time zone I was in. Having grown accustomed to Weird Western, or "Pacific" time, I was two hours behind when I got back to sunny dusty Texas on Saturday. It's taken me until tonight to catch up. Many apologies and subservient groveling. Grovel grovel.

The reason why it's taken that long to get with the program is my new job, which is really slapping me silly right now. Take today, for example: I go to this old smoky lady's house, turn off her computer so I can install some stuff, and then press the power button. The computer does nothing. The lady, thankfully, didn't freak out. I took her computer back to the office, and was informed by a longtime worker there that her computer always does that. Do you see what I'm up against here? Imagine the first week of whatever your job is and you do a routine task and a second later it appears you just cost the company hundreds of dollars. I guess one of my jobs there will be to build a knowledge base for things like this. Somebody's got to, before I go crazy.

So I went from that nightmare to this gigantic house that I was supposed to move computer equipment and a network into. The customer casually mentioned that they were switching which computer was attached to the internet connection. The only problem with that is I basically had to remake an entire network without being prepared to do that...I was missing a bunch of stuff, and couldn't get the job done today. On top of that, they wanted me to run some coaxial cable across the wall, which is not what I get paid for. So I kinda felt like a failure this morning, but my boss just tried to make me understand that these sorts of things happen all the time, and that I shouldn't be discouraged. The worst case scenario is that I go back tomorrow and can't get the network going, and then my boss will send the other guy out there to see if he can get it to work. Of course, tomorrow right now is looking like a slow day around there, so that might work out ok. Not that I'm going to actually fail.

Anyway, I followed that big debacle with a trip to a nice man with an easy problem (who was getting the work for half-price), so it all turned out ok. I even got to eat some lunch and chill because my late repair never called back. Such is my life now.

The worst part? I totally smelled like smoke after breaking that old woman's computer. How do you people handle that?