Scattered

That best describes my feeling (and mental state) of late.

Work has been... not quite "frantic," but busy. With the other tech off the beginning of this week and the end of last, I've been juggling a little more than I might have otherwise. Thankfully, this hasn't led to any particularly long hours. I got called in on the weekend only once, and briefly at that. So this hasn't made things worse than usual, but there's still a lot going on.


I've been mired one lovely issue complicated beyond belief. We've been planning to change our circulation software to one that uses different postal data. This was originally planned to be done at the end of this month, but due to various things I'm not even all familiar with we're not even close. So when someone pointed out that our current postal data was set to expire at the end of the month, I wasn't initially worried. "Oh, maybe the disks are running late," I thought. The support person I contacted, however, informed me we hadn't renewed our service. This, of course, because we weren't planning to need it this late. So I've been scrambling around to get that renewed. The company that provides the disks/data seems resistant to handling the subscriptions itself, so I ended up having to go through someone else. And overnight-ship payment. And then delivery failed. Only today we got that sorted out - I was given the wrong street address (a North instead of a South). Payment's finally been received, so now we just need to get the disks sent to us. It should work out yet, but good grief it's been crazy. And all I ever did with the process before was to install the data when the disks show up.

We've got a computer that is randomly restarting. It doesn't seem to be overheating, nothing unusual is showing up in the event logs, and it even fully restarted after being told to not automatically restart on a crash. Even more confusing, when it does this it takes that user's phone offline (displaying "no service") too. Which... makes no sense. Ethernet runs through the phone to the computer, so if the phone's screwed up the computer might lose its network connection. There shouldn't be any dependency in the other direction. But something is going on there.

I've got another computer that's printing some characters in some PDF files incorrectly some of the time. That's a headache and a half. It may or may not be related to the spoolsv.exe service on our printer server maxing out at times even when there are no print jobs in progress.

This on top of "normal" stuff. I'm rebuilding one laptop that had unknown problems from a factory default state (only to have it start blue screening on me). I'm shipping one laptop with hard drive problems to a repair depot. I'm replacing toner and helping with printer jams. I usually lose a few hours a week to cleaning malware (and the latest had the annoying twist of setting everything on the c: drive as "hidden"). I'm trying to make progress with removing licensed software and data from old machines so they can be recycled/sold/given away. And troubleshooting anything else that might come up.

It's not uncommon for me to get back to my desk and... be completely unsure what to move onto next. I'm frequently going in several directions at once.

So when I've spent my day wracking my brain over things like this, I'm not terribly chipper or mentally spry.