You go to heck, Wednesday. You go to heck and you die.

Eff you very much, Wednesday.  You go eff yourself.  You go to heck.  You go to heck and you die.

So I guess you're wondering how my day was?

My day started with going into the tiny room that is filled with computers and some kind of undoubtedly toxic grainy black dust.  My job was to change the IP addresses of all the computers while somebody else put in a new switch.  I lost track of how many people popped into the room to attempt cheerful conversation with me while I was struggling to A) get any effing thing to work, and B) not punch their larynx into a fine paste against their spine.  For future reference?  When I'm trying to fix things is a really bad time to talk to me.  I can think hard or I can talk.  I can't do both at once.  And when I need to think hard and you make me talk?  It stresses me out.

When I stress out is when the bad things happen.

Every one of the machines had something different going on.  One had a keyboard in Finnish.  The keys were in the wrong places, and some of the keys had four symbols on them.  I could only get two symbols to work for any given key.  Then, when I finally managed to type in  my name and password?  IT SWITCHED KEYBOARDS.  It thought I was now using an American English keyboard.  It didn't say anything to me about it.. it just assumed the letters were on different keys.

The one to its left had a wireless mouse and keyboard, and the batteries in the mouse had died.  Also, it had no real GUI interface.  It came up with a blue screen and a mouse pointer.  That's it.

The next two were basically okay, but although they are supposed to be identical, one thought its mouse was right handed, and one thought its mouse was left handed.

The one on the end had a black screen.  I had to power cycle it to get it to come up with anything I could see.

I spent three hours in that room, just changing IP addresses.  The guy who had ordered the change stopped by to tell me he hadn't realized it was such a big deal just to change some IP addresses.  REALLY?  WHEN IT HAD TO BE SCHEDULED SO FAR IN ADVANCE, AND GOT DELAYED OVER AND OVER BECAUSE OF ISSUES?  Oh, he's so lucky he still has that larynx.

Also, while I was doing all this, somebody came in with a sticky note with a password on it.  Right then, while I was busy and getting crankier by the moment, is when somebody decided was a good time to hand me system administration duties on another computer.. which also needed its address changed.

Once I finally got back to my office, I spent the entire rest of the day trying to iron out problems resulting from the addresses changing.  Which meant finding the two small typos in any one of several dozen files, checking and doublechecking firewall rules on each computer and the network based firewall, and wondering why the machine that was running at 1 gig on the old switch was now running at 100 megabytes, half duplex, on the new switch.  And of course having many, many collisions.  As it turns out?  Solaris 9, specifically with the particular network interface this machine has?  Doesn't really do network configuration like any other version of Solaris, or unix that I'm familiar with.  Which doesn't explain why it wasn't working, but DOES explain why it took me nearly an hour to verify that it was running at 100hd.  And, it explains why when I tried to fix it based on the mode average of all the advice I found on google, the machine took itself right the hell offline.

Not that it matters.  Not that it was talking to something OUT IN SPACE, OR ANYTHING.

Oh, right.  Crap.