Quite and interesting few days
Actually Thursday was the day from hell, and I had decided to write it up Thursday night but of course all hell had broken loose. Thursday started with an barely announced visit by our Echostar Rep and his boss. I usually like to be mentally prepared for these things so the hour warning that they were coming was not fully welcome.
Then about 10 min into the meeting an Electronic Doc customer came in the door. Now to give the man fair hearing he had come in two days ago inquiring about his projection TV that we were working on. This was another of our mystery jobs and my tech was frankly having a bit of a time fixing it. So Tuesday I had promised the customer I would call him back and frankly I forgot.
Well this had put he man in to paroxysm of rage. He started by calling me a liar and then proceeded to cuss me out with every four and six letter word in the book. When I asked him to not cuss in the presence of my guests he practically called me out and said if I wanted to I could call the Police. Oh my. Thank god my boss heard this interaction and pulled us out into a different part of the building. The abuse continued for about 15 min, with me silently taking it so I would not loose it myself. Finally he left but my time was up with the Echostar people whom I apologized to profusely.
So then we tried to order the part that we needed for the job and discovered that we were on "credit hold" due to what I assumed was an administrative error. This assumption was made because my boss had told me that he was paying the Toshiba invoices on a timely basis. So I spent a good portion of the day rushing around getting invoices together and on the phone with Toshiba (whom were more not available than available, and who do not seem to return their voice mails). Finally I had the whole thing reconstructed and brought it to the boss, who I might add had sent me on this bookkeeping errand to begin with. Then he mentions that he had not paid it. Oh!
Of course at 4 ish the power grid went down. Now this is a bad thing for us because our server is so antiquated that it is a major effort to restart it AND there is always that niggling possibility that it will not start up again at all. The power fluctuated twice so we finally shut it down completely.
As I mentioned below OUR power was not an issue, but I sure felt for the friends I have further south who were without power from anywhere from four to 48 hours. I figured that the Net was down because the backbone runs though NYC. It wasn't till Friday night that I determined that my computer had forgot the networking protocols that are needed for it to communicate with the cable modem. This has happened before so once I know what was going down I was able to rectify it fairly quickly.
On to Friday. A decent day at work but then I rushed home (as usual) to get Alex from the YMCA. Today was to be his first Soccer practice. I went to the field.. and no team. Went back home and got the coach's phone number.. no answer. Finally I just bagged it as I met Liza back down near my office so she could drop off her car for service.
NO I'M NOT DONE....
My new phone started acting weird on Wednesday. Kept saying that I needed to Change Battery even though it was charged. I plugged it in Thursday night to charge it and it went dead. Figuring it was the battery I went to Verizon and stood in line to get a new battery. Friday the same thing started happening again! So I spent a half hour on the phone with technical and got a return authorization. So today I spent another long line waiting to get the phone replaced as we had determined that it must be a software issue with my phone. I think that my car charger was scrambling the battery or software so I'm not going to use it for two weeks. If the problem doesn't reappear I will try using the car charger. I told Verizon that and they said go for it, and I could get another phone if the problem happened again.
I have to give some kudo's to Verizon Customer Service. It's been fairly impressive. Well enough musing and meandering for the three days last. Thanks for reading.
Quote of the Day:We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
-- David Russell
Actually Thursday was the day from hell, and I had decided to write it up Thursday night but of course all hell had broken loose. Thursday started with an barely announced visit by our Echostar Rep and his boss. I usually like to be mentally prepared for these things so the hour warning that they were coming was not fully welcome.
Then about 10 min into the meeting an Electronic Doc customer came in the door. Now to give the man fair hearing he had come in two days ago inquiring about his projection TV that we were working on. This was another of our mystery jobs and my tech was frankly having a bit of a time fixing it. So Tuesday I had promised the customer I would call him back and frankly I forgot.
Well this had put he man in to paroxysm of rage. He started by calling me a liar and then proceeded to cuss me out with every four and six letter word in the book. When I asked him to not cuss in the presence of my guests he practically called me out and said if I wanted to I could call the Police. Oh my. Thank god my boss heard this interaction and pulled us out into a different part of the building. The abuse continued for about 15 min, with me silently taking it so I would not loose it myself. Finally he left but my time was up with the Echostar people whom I apologized to profusely.
So then we tried to order the part that we needed for the job and discovered that we were on "credit hold" due to what I assumed was an administrative error. This assumption was made because my boss had told me that he was paying the Toshiba invoices on a timely basis. So I spent a good portion of the day rushing around getting invoices together and on the phone with Toshiba (whom were more not available than available, and who do not seem to return their voice mails). Finally I had the whole thing reconstructed and brought it to the boss, who I might add had sent me on this bookkeeping errand to begin with. Then he mentions that he had not paid it. Oh!
Of course at 4 ish the power grid went down. Now this is a bad thing for us because our server is so antiquated that it is a major effort to restart it AND there is always that niggling possibility that it will not start up again at all. The power fluctuated twice so we finally shut it down completely.
As I mentioned below OUR power was not an issue, but I sure felt for the friends I have further south who were without power from anywhere from four to 48 hours. I figured that the Net was down because the backbone runs though NYC. It wasn't till Friday night that I determined that my computer had forgot the networking protocols that are needed for it to communicate with the cable modem. This has happened before so once I know what was going down I was able to rectify it fairly quickly.
On to Friday. A decent day at work but then I rushed home (as usual) to get Alex from the YMCA. Today was to be his first Soccer practice. I went to the field.. and no team. Went back home and got the coach's phone number.. no answer. Finally I just bagged it as I met Liza back down near my office so she could drop off her car for service.
NO I'M NOT DONE....
My new phone started acting weird on Wednesday. Kept saying that I needed to Change Battery even though it was charged. I plugged it in Thursday night to charge it and it went dead. Figuring it was the battery I went to Verizon and stood in line to get a new battery. Friday the same thing started happening again! So I spent a half hour on the phone with technical and got a return authorization. So today I spent another long line waiting to get the phone replaced as we had determined that it must be a software issue with my phone. I think that my car charger was scrambling the battery or software so I'm not going to use it for two weeks. If the problem doesn't reappear I will try using the car charger. I told Verizon that and they said go for it, and I could get another phone if the problem happened again.
I have to give some kudo's to Verizon Customer Service. It's been fairly impressive. Well enough musing and meandering for the three days last. Thanks for reading.
Quote of the Day:We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic.
-- David Russell
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