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Two More Days

10 06 09 - 19:43 And it hasn't been as crazy as I thought it would be. Of course, it helps that business slowed down a bit. Usually I get like 5-6 calls on average, now I'm only averaging 2-3. Like last Friday I had nothing.

So my morning merriment was Mail malignancy on a Mac. Mysterious. Or not, as I found out the guy had wanted to show the "from" line being from both him and his wife, separately, so he had his email account in there three times and then was mystified as to why his mail was messed up. Gee, wonder why? So I made her a separate account, removed the two duplicates, and was on my way. Stopped in for a checkup on a PC, no worries there. Then I stopped in to see my buddy Lou.

Yes, the Lou I spoke of earlier. Seems he got a new printer for "father's day" (a bit early, isn't it?) and was trying to hook it up. To his ME system. Yeah, good luck. It only supports win2k and higher. Oh, you mean I can't use my 10 year old OS anymore? Boohoo. Recall that he cited the printer "not working" as one of the reasons he took his much better XP system off. I offered to hook it back up now that he had a modern printer. Oh, no, can't do that, I'm a moron, he-he-he. So, it being an all-in-one with a fax we replaced his ancient fax machine that won't feed more then one sheet at a time (his copier has the same problem. And he's a copy shop. Go figure). So at least he'll get some use out of it.

This was about 1:00 so I came home to eat lunch. Watched part of the keynote for the Apple WWDC, can't wait for Snow Leopard in September! Checked my calls, Helen from a hotel called me that she had some things to do. Now this is where the story becomes stab worthy. I say, I have a wedding in two days, I want to get things done, so I call and go over there. This place is interesting. Last time I worked there I discovered the site license for Norton had expired a year ago, so every PC in the place was no longer protected. Fine. But here, fix this PC, but, oh, oops, I don't have any passwords for anything. Dur, and I think my pants are on backwards. Whatever. So I first look at a printer. It's telling me the toner cartridge has a problem. There's the same model printer next to it, so I swap them. Yup, other printer now says the same thing, and this printer now prints very faintly and flashes "order new toner". Well, they had one, so I put it in. Now all I get are blank sheets. Great. I don't know anything about printer repair, so off to the next thing.

The next thing being two "public" machines she's supposedly having trouble with. The one has all kinds of error messages on it and is in a very narrow cubby with a door on it. I open the door and heat POURS out, so I think, great, this machine dead of heat. I notice the sticker, it's Windows 2000, but this machine is running XP. Great, a pirated copy of XP running in a hotel. Maybe you don't know this, but running any windows machines gives Microsoft the right to go in and demand all your license info and receipts, and fine you a bizzilion dollars if you can't. Sigh. Anyway, I run chkdsk and it boots up again. There are two accounts. One admin, one not. Does anyone know the password? Of course not. So I boot from my little tools CD and wipe the admin password so I can boot into safe mode and wipe the user account with admin privileges password. I do this because I don't like doing things with my tool behind windows back, so I do as little as possible with this tool. This I do. I reboot. It still has a password. I try the other machine. Same deal. I bang my head against this &&&*%$*# machine for about an hour before I start poking around to see what the freak is going on. Turns out there's a piece of software on here I would have recommended myself. It's a neat idea actually, every change to the machine is basically temporary, after every reboot, the machine returns to the state it was when the software was installed. Handy. If you can turn it off. Which I could do. WITH THE PASSWORD THAT NO ONE KNOWS. So I can't troubleshoot either of these machines, or update them or anything, because anything I do will get wiped out when it reboots. Great.

I go to tell Helen this, and the very nice young lady at the front desk says "she went home". Oh, thanks for informing me. Can you imagine this? I just had my security system rebuilt on saturday (because of passwords, duh. The lady I bought the house from said the person she bought it from didn't have the passwords for the panel. So I figured it was about time to do something about that.) Can you see the guy going down into the basement to hook up the new box and when he comes up, I've left to go grocery shopping? I mean, if you hire someone to do work, STAY until they FINISH the WORK. Or at least come and say "I have to go now, leave the invoice at the front desk and I'll send you a check right out." But no, I'm just left, high and dry. So the last thing there was the security system, which is supposedly not recording. Well, I go back in time and see myself working on the printer, so I guess it is. (Hey, we actually knew the password to this machine. Amazing)

So I leave a bit perturbed, knowing that not only did I get nothing done because no one knows anything, I can't be paid for the hours I wasted trying to get things to work that never well, because no one knows anything, and I have to call her back tomorrow and tell her what happened and then go back again to figure out what we're going to do about it all. (Probably buy XP for that system, wipe both, reload, and get them working properly again, THEN put the drive-shield back on. Which they'll probably have to buy again as no one will know the serial number or have any disks or anything.)

I mean, it's a business. Don't you think there would be a book of some kind listing all passwords, and what's done to each machine, like a diary? What each machine has, what it does, you know, that kind of thing. No, just throw stuff around and hope it doesn't break. I hate working for businesses.

So, rehearsal at 5:00 tomorrow, we pick up the tuxes right before, and I have two jobs to get to. Maybe another, I have one more call to make right now.

But hey, Snow Leopard, right?