My Corner of the Interweb

He can't be bargained with! He can't be reasoned with!

Mood: Armor on, sword drawn, muthafucka.
Music: Big Time Sensuality, Bjork.
Game: World of Warcraft, Planetside, Call of Duty, Auto Assault Beta.
Book: Working my way through assorted White Wolf Vampire rulebooks.
Muffin: Raspberry-Blackberry.
Punchline: "Is there something wrong with our connectivity?"

Where to begin?

Sunday, I went to my mother's house to help her pack up, and to wish her a happy birthday. She has no ability to handle moving. She hates and fears change, like so many other people, and she's nervous about the whole thing. By the way, she doesn't have to move until the end of September...and she's packing. She lives in under 650sq ft. I could pack her whole apartment in a relaxing weekend. But she wanted to get started early. So we packed.

Was a stressful week for my mother. The family business closed, she had a birthday, she's moving...lots of changes for her. Makes her nervous, I suppose. But she'll make it through. She always has. And anyway, I'm here to help. So there's that.

Monday, I woke up, and frankly, wasn't feeling like going to work. I called in for a personal day. I cleaned the house, worked on my resume, played some games, read chunks of the new Harry Potter book, cooked a yummy lunch and then a yummy dinner, watched Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (which I recommend highly.)

In short, it was pretty much a mental health day. I needed one pretty badly, it seems, because I was in a pretty good mood this morning, in spite of the fact that I finished the Harry Potter book at 2:30am this morning. What can I tell you? I read fast...and I hate putting a good book down.

Rowling has definitely gotten better with her writing. It doesn't feel so forced or playful. The writing is pretty solid, and the characters are definitely fully fleshed. There are still plenty of throwaway characters and ideas and such...and plenty of gratuitous cameos by magic and people alike...but overall it was pretty good. I liked it better than the last one, for certain.

Anyway, woke up, peeled myself out of bed, got out of the shower, and immediately got a phone call. Newsflash: if my work phone is ringing just before 8am, I'm either onsite (which I'm not this month...) or there's something wrong at work.

Turns out that our T1 went down around 6am. Fabulous.

Now, we do our own DNS, hosting, and mailhosting. This means we have no web presence, and no mail in or out.

If you've ever dealt with major connectivity in NYC, you've dealt with Verizon. They're the only game in town. Yes, there are thousands of resellers and ISPs...but your circuit is undeniably owned and operated by Verizon. That means that you can have any color of car you like...but it's all the same exact model.

When the circuit fails, the ISP says "we're calling Verizon" and then you're in Verizonland. This means that they are "working on it" until it's fixed...which could be in 30 minutes...it could be tomorrow. And even the ISP can get no more than that. Occasionally, you'll get a "we're dispatching someone this afternoon..." but that's usually a lie, and sometimes they fix it before the dispatch...or well after.

Now, let's be a LITTLE fair to Verizon. They ARE the only game in town, and by and large, I've only had 4 outages of any consequence in the last 3 years and change...so it's not THAT bad. But when it's down...oh boy.

Of course, when you're the IT guy, and connectivity is down, you get questions every 5 minutes: "Is there something wrong with our mail?" "My computer can't go on the web." "Is something wrong with our internet?" (Of course, I love the last one. Yes. Our whole internet is down. Damn that Al Gore!)

Anyway, to avoid torture and pain, I posted this message all over the office:

---

Yes, our connectivity is down.

No, I don’t know when it’ll be back.

Yes, we’re working on it.

No, I have no ETA on Verizon.

Yes, I’ll let everyone know when it’s back.

---

Anyway, about 3 hours after the reported outage, it came back up. For no reason. I'm not complaining...because it's up. But when I called my ISP as to a reason (you know, to see if this is going to be a regular occurrence...) they simply replied that Verizon had provided no information, they have no idea what they did, but they're seeing my smartjack, and we have a loop again.

OK...so it's working. And I'm blogging.

Maybe I'll go take another mental health day.

Posted by Glenn at August 2, 2005 11:27 AM