Out and in

Yesterday Mike failed to show up, relegating me to the main office where I would help another senior sort out envelopes that were to contain mailers and recruitment notices. This senior managed to tell me that my permit to drive had expired as I had failed to show up for my examination, so on Friday I will need to file once more.

Today, though, he did turn up. The task of the day was to finish the computer that had reported the error of doom and return it to the nursing instructor; as it turned out, the keyboard had been antagonistic. Other than that, we just had to reinstall Windows XP on one computer, amid several tests that we found were unnecessary as the CD-ROM had merely doubted the integrity of the installation CD.

Mike, though, had something else on his mind. He had recently received a hard drive from Advanced Internet Management as an upgrade for the ESS firewall switch and was prepared to forward an announcement that the Internet would be down for a half hour whilst he installed it. This half-hour started right after lunch, when he returned from his own break. While it was a rather easy task removing the switch from the rack, the removal of the covering revealed something hilarious: Aside from the method of screwing the current hard drive into both the interface and the bottom plate, all the cables servicing the hard drive were secured with gel!

After fooling with the chisel, laughing at the lack of accommodation afforded by the gel method, we put the switch back in. The next step would be to figure out why the login details to the interface were not maintained as promised.