Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right...

You ever have one of those weeks that make you want to crawl into bed with some spreadable swiss cheese, a box of crackers and green olives and watch the Lifetime Movie Network all weekend and cry? No? Just me? Is it the cheese that's throwing you off? Substitute your favorite comfort food, you'll get my drift.

Some of you know what I do for a living. I am a geek. Not in that, hey, she knows something about computers kind of way...in that she's the firewall administrator, unix administrator kind of way. Geeks like me say things like "direction enforcement for unidirectional connections, where packet flow is in the opposite direction to the connection direction."

HUH?

Yeah, really no one says that. But it was in one of my training manuals once, so I clipped it and keep it on my monitor. When and if I ever understand what the hell THAT geek is talking about, I know I have arrived.

Mostly I just sit around praying nothing breaks. I'm in the same biz as the Jimmer and Sher-bear. Insurance. I am this company's insurance policy. You don't NEED your insurance every single day, but you pay the premium because when shit hits the fan, you have to have the policy to bail you out. That's me. I'm the policy. Which mostly is good...I can sit here and blog with you guys and read other blogs and respond to them, and catch up on the news and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...oh sorry...where was I?

Monday my firewall went down at 4:05 pm. Just not there. Just sitting at a prompt that says ok. Well, in the geek world ok is not okay. ok means I don't know what to do next. Ok means I can't boot. ok means help I've fallen and I can't get up. Because I'm a fairly decent geek, I had a spare firewall in the safe. Got the firewall up and running and back on track by 6:45pm. YAY for me.

Until Tuesday, when my phone rings at 6am and it's my boss. He's not calling to say, "Hey, great job yesterday, why don't you stay home." He's calling to tell me that our email isn't working. That the queue is stacking up and I should probably take a look at it before the gen pop gets to the office and starts REALLY filling the queue. Shit. The problem isn't that I can't fix it...the problem is that my shitty dsl keeps going up and down the entire time I'm trying to fix it. Very frustrating. I actually figured out what was going on fairly quickly...my arp wasn't arp-ing. Hurrah! We've had this problem before. So I call my handy dandy firewall tech support staff because they'll be able to tell me how to fix this lickety-splickety. Except they can't. Because our support contract expired May 1st and I didn't renew it. Ahem. WHAT??? Oh.my.God. What's that saying about "Idle hands are the devil's tools?" Seriously. How on earth did I let this happen? Oy.

So I try to remember how to fix this blasted problem, and eventually I do, by about noon on Tuesday. No mail was lost, just delayed. All is well.

And I have a paralyzed kitten waiting for me when I get home.

And a school board that's screwing us royally.

Wednesday was actually a good day.

Thursday my email firewall powers down in the middle of the day. For no apparent reason. I switch outlets on the UPS and boom, back and running.

Until 4 am. When it shuts off again. Clearly we're experiencing a power problem. And I'm the only geek here. So once again our email is down. Luckily I was able to take the email firewall out of the mail route and bring us back to life again, but the ironic part is that I only needed this box to last 2 more weeks. We've had it 4 years. I needed two more weeks, because then we're switching to something else. 2 MORE WEEKS. For the love.

And now my husband is home sick with some sort of stomach virus.

And my contacts are drying out.

And all I can think about is Family Pizza for dinner. And my cheese. and my crackers. and my olives. Which I have SO earned this week.

Enjoy a good chilly weekend with the comfort food of your choice, people...you've all earned it.