Technology woes

I’m beginning to think there is some sort of strange force at work in the world. It almost seems like the WWII gremlins have returned with a vengeance. At least that seems to be the case where my life intersects with technology, which is pretty much everywhere. This past week has been pretty rough for a lot of reasons. I’ll try to start at the beginning…
Sunday morning the main server for the library I work at blew up. Thankfully for me I did not find out about it until Monday morning. Upon arriving at work my boss informed me she could not get signed on. I check on my workstation and found the same to be true. I then noticed an email from the server guy in I.T. informing me that it had died on Sunday and that HP would be there by 8am to fix it. It took most of the day Monday to get our system back to life. The error messages the system would give were very cryptic. They attempted to repair it by replacing just about every component in the machine. Once they replaced the motherboard the error messages pointed directly to memory issues. Of course, the memory was the only replacement part that HP had not sent. The tech called in to have it sent over, and to our horror was told they do not have the memory in stock. After informing him that this was mission critical and we REALLY needed it back HP decided to send someone down with the memory for Kalamazoo MI. The memory was supposed to be here by 3:30. By 5:15 it still had not arrived and we were rather irritated. (Have I mentioned I don’t get paid for any work past 4:30) We finally discovered that the memory had indeed arrived around 4:45 and was delivered to the receiving department for the college NOT to the I.T. department as it should have been. So the campus server guru, the HP service tech, and myself headed over to receiving with a sinking feeling in our stomachs… Sure enough, they were all gone for the night. Thankfully the night custodian manager managed to get us into the shipping office where we were able to retrieve the badly needed memory. Upon our return the HP guy installed the memory and restarted the server and things came up relatively unharmed. Thank god the memory blew up during a backup so the system was in a clean state with none of the library software actually running corrupting data. I spent another 3 hours manually running jobs that did not run, checking over data and finally loading in the days standalone system data.

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