Friday, November 30, 2007

Patience is not always a virtue

All this week the network's been getting progressively slower and slower...a real frustration when you're trying to access the Internet, answer email, answer the phone (which is voice over IP, of course), save documents to your H: drive, fix computer problems remotely, etc., etc., etc.

Now, maybe I'm too patient sometimes, because I just chalked it up to the fact that I know they've been working on the network this week and figured it would eventually get better. A few people who are less patient, however, called the Help Desk and complained, and lo! we were visited this afternoon by a member of the telcomm team. He replaced a small gadget in the switch, rebooted the switch (which didn't want to come right back up but apparently eventually saw things his way), and voila! We have a network that appears to be working at a reasonable speed.

Go figure.

Anytime the network goes down it's fascinating to watch how people deal with it. We're so used to working on email, Internet, etc., and folks just generally seem to be at a loss when that's taken away. I fortunately, was working on a document that was local on my machine, so I was able to keep working, and it was kind of nice not to have email or phone interruptions for a few minutes.

I was not, however, able to watch the pandas. Bummer! The news from San Diego, though, is that their little girl is now officially named Zhen Zhen (which means "Precious"). Congratulations to the staff of SDZ & especially to mom Bai Yun & dad Gao Gao!

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