Really shite day at work on Thursday. I got on the train slumped down, got a magazine out of my bag to slump my brain into for the return journey home, & noticed my packed lunch had not managed to get out of my bag. I had not eaten it & not realised it! We were a tad busy…
I noticed that there was something up when I tried to dial in to collect some expectant email & note the I had been outbid once more on a pcmcia network card for this emate on ebay…. yet again. The new BT provided phone lines were not giving authentication on our dialup . Uh oh. Changed to another number to pop into the IRC channel we use for work & see if there was anyone there to check up on it. Not really. OK – well it may be nothing. Unfortunately it was not ‘nothing’. As soon as I put the phone on the hook at work it was going crazy. As feared there was something wrong with the lines & EVERYONE who we had tried to get in on these new BT numbers (including the ‘surftime’ thing) was getting authentication failure. The BT system was somehow not passing the calls on correctly to our authentication servers: people’s username & password were being messed up in the transition & nobody could get on. AAAAAAAA!
We have just been spending an age trying to get people onto these lines as they are supposedly going to be more reliable in their routing than the lines we already have (& the company gets more kickback on them). Good ol’ BT. The problem was cured about midday. The afternoon was spent helping people with over complicated little problems. One nice old lady (who made me miss my usual train as the call took so long) had had her computer set up by her son who had since departed to Europe. Nothing wrong in that, but the mail application was Quickmail Pro for Windows. One of the more obscure mail applications I have come across. The error messages it was giving were misleading (but it lead me to ‘cleaning up’ a sloppy set up) but after a few goes we got there in the end. Nice to get a result in such muddled circumstances. In the middle of the phone problem mayhem I had a call from a little Mr. Angry; who rather than want his problems sorting out seemed to want to go on & on & on…
Friday was a much better day. Back to the usual level of calls (i.e:. I could breathe between calls,
UG. Never rains, but it pours (in our back room.). Jill (electrician Jill) was fitting the lights in the attic. I went up to see her was doing when I got home from work on Friday & all looked tickety-boo. That is except for the fact that the halogen strip had no bulbs (!). Box said that they were included & as they can be a fiver each, easily, this is not something we would slip up on. Phoned the department store we bought them from in Leeds there & then. Dithering on the part of the shop assistant on the phone had them leaving to call back.