Thursday 18 June 2009

Damn and blast

BigPond had a nasty little outage yesterday afternoon - our internet was there one minute, gone the next. I setup a continuous ping on the Telstra DNS servers, and over half the packets were being lost. I gave up trying to do anything electronic and read a book instead.

The outage didn't last that long, but since then, I have been unable to send or recieve a single item of mail from Outlook. I don't know if the outage was just a coincidence with some other nefarious gremlin that has gone awry in the bowels of my beast, but it is most annoying. Webmail still works, but I like all my email to flow into one place, where I can deal with it. I've checked all the email settings, and nothing is amiss.

Computers, for all their wonderfulness, really are such fragile beasts. The merest grain of sand in the gearbox can bring the whole contraption grinding to a shuddering halt.

The same goes for my memory. I was shown around my new place of work the other day - the company that I work for has several floors in the one building. I was given the grand tour of each floor, then packed up and went home.

The following day, I arrived for work, and for the life of me could not remember which floor I was supposed to be working on. I knew I could exclude 2 floors where I definitely did not have a seat, but that meant getting out of the lift at numerous floors and then wandering around until I saw something familiar. I went through quite a floors until I got the right one.....

It's not like I am not used to moving office. In 18 years of working in and around the CBD, I have worked in at least 15 different buildings - perhaps more. Until now, I have never gotten lost in the office. Brain must be turning to mush.

The upside is that tomorrow, I ride. I have to go and lay out all the kit now, so everything will be ready and findable in the dark. Also gotta charge the battery for the headlight. Chances are, I'm going to get soaked.

1 comment:

kc said...

I was getting a refill prescription over the phone a couple days ago. When asked for spouse's social security number, the one that came into my head was NOT the one I gave to the Navy for over 25 years - I couldn't remember any but the last 4 for that one - it was the ex-husband I've not seen or thought much about since 1983!

Internet and phone trouble here, too. Then I really fouled it up by allowing a drip from a newly-watered plant to fall where it shouldn't. *sigh*