Geek on Two Wheels

To summarize, it was a great day of riding, and I replied to about 200 pieces of email today. Why, you ask? Read on…

Lets start from the beginning.

I first noticed something was amiss when I noticed that a co-worker of mine — who receives emails sent to our webmaster@ address — forwarded me about 8 pieces of tech support email in the morning. As atrocious as the integration of our various systems are, I average roughly a email per month that has to be forwarded to me from webmaster@ — something was terribly wrong.

As a matter of routine, I check my helpdesk email account, and Lo! 60+ pieces of new email since Friday. Something is definitely wrong.

Now, since I could not actually scroll through my email, due to the horrible web interface to Lotus which I have no choice but to use, I was not able to fully comprehend the gravity of the situation until much later. However, a quick scan revealed an email which points out that the database server for the PASBC has gone belly-up, bringing down the entire system with it. Fantastic. I will have to deal with all these emails after I get back from the chiropractor.

When I returned to my post, after an unsuccessful attempt to use Internet Explore (apparently, Lotus Notes works even worse in IE, as in, I can’t get a list of emails), and using some clever window-manipulation (I’d never thought that xfce’s Alt+drag for moving windows will come in handy) I discovered, to my horror, that the new email count was over 220.

Fuck.

This, afterall, being my job, I had no choice but to push ahead. Quickly composing two canned-responses, I began the flurry of click and pasting that would occupy a good portion of my day.

Well, after completing my application for funding for CUTC, anyway.

Now, at this point, I thought that it couldn’t possibly get worse. Well, we all know how that usually works out…

The Lotus Mail web interface is such a mess of javascript and pop-up windows such that after prolonged use, it would actually bug-out Firefox’s pop-up blocker, causing no new tabs to be created, even with the website whitelisted, making reading the nebulous amount of email, much less replying to them, impossible. Even worse, the javascript heavy site actually brought Firefox down to its knees several times, even causing my poor browser to raise warning messages asking if I was absolutely sure that I would let such destructive and snail-paced scripts to run.

Only a few minutes into my daunting task, I am quickly tempted away from the task at hand by the promise of good bike riding. As fortune would have it, today is the first day in quite a long time when it has not rained the night before, and the day-star was actually showing it’s blinding but glorious face.

This oppertunity was not to be wasted, massive inbox or not.

Long story short, the riding was awesome. Slightly muddy and wet, but awesome.

After getting back to campus late for my evening class, I proceeded to spend the next hour struggling with wireless in a futile attempt to get back to answering all of my emails. One misconfigured accesspoint and much profanity later, I was once again greeted by auth1, which, miraculously, was eager to grant me access to the IntarWeb.

Much pasting, web-browser restarting, half-assed attempts at paying attention to the lecture, a break to ride home in the darkness (which, again, was awesome), eat dinner, and even more profanity later, it was done: my inbox once again in a glorious state of no-new-emails.

Even accounting for duplicate emails from the more impatient clients, at least 200 pieces of email was replied to today, of which most are from unique users. I hope never, ever, to do this again, EVER.

Now that I have completed this relatively brief but much needed rest from electronic mail, I’m afraid I must once again open my digital notepad for yet more email writing, as there are announcements that need to be made, and events hyped about.

Lets hope that only a very, very small portion of those 200 users decide to ask me more questions tomorrow…

Tags: rant

This entry was posted on 2005-11-07 (Monday) at 22:48 and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.