"......everywhere, like, such as......" and other ruminations: B365v2.127

I had mentioned the other day that I would be left in charge of Smithfield News all by my little lonesome for a couple of days, Brian was going to be out of town and Ed made his winterly sojourn to Florida early this year. One the management flow chart that left yours truly at the top. Now I haven't gone drunk with power the last two days, in fact I have been scrambling trying to keep the ship from sinking. Allow me to explain.

I got into work about a half hour early Monday morning. I figured I would give myself some extra time to deal with the weekend paperwork and what not, get my ducks all in a row and tackle the day. Except it didn 't go quite like that.

I had the lottery banged out in decent time Monday morning, and I was at Brian's desk working on the sales numbers and listening to Spotify. It was dare I say, going swimmingly. But if there is anything I learned about swimming this summer is it is just a few feet from drowning. As I am at the desk I see Spotify say that it went offline. No big thing, Brian's computer probably is riddled with viruses. I have no idea what he opens back there when he views his email, but at least once a week he does something that calls for my attention because something it has stopped working. So I reboot the computer, but that doesn't solve the problem. I find out that in fact all of the computers in the building have went offline.

This isn't my first time tackling this rodeo either, we have the name and number of a Verizon tech guy filed away for just such emergencies. The last time this happened, it wasn't an us problem, Verizon had a local outtage. So I am following the steps they tell me to take on the phone and lo and behold, they tell me I need to reset the modem. That made things worse, not better. We called Russel to see if he could solve our problems and he did, as well as saying that everyone that called Verizon to get back lonline he was being forced to visit that day because it was simply a local outtage and nothing wrong with any one locations equipment. Had they just told us to wait, everything would have been fine as soon as service was restored. So I am thinking again, this could be a local outtage issue, I don't want to call them and fuck with the equipment needlessly, so I call Russell, see if he knows anything about an outtage. I get his voicemail, but that is all. Now us losing internet service is a big thing because that means we lose our ability to do credit and debit transactions. So I try unplugging all of the modems and routers and plugging them back in (but not resetting anything) but no luck there. I figure if this is a local issue, that would explain why Russell hasn't gotten back to me yet. Finally I call him back about 3pm after he hadn't returned my call. He had good reason not too though, he took the day off to take his dog to the vet. But he walked me through a couple of things to try, which didn't work, and promised he would stop by in the morning to look at things himself.

So I come in this morning, figuring that I would have to deal with the credit/debit issue as well as get my order ready to put in with Sledd. The thing is, I use the internet for that too, so I had to go the backup route there and send the signal audio wise down a phone line. It only took three attempts before that worked. Meanwhile, Russell shows up and he starts doing his once over with things and I have three vendors show up looking to get paid. And life is all about getting paid after all. I dispatch with them, Russell finishes his work, the computers seem to be all online but the credit/debit processing still isn't working. Now I am looking at a register issue, because those cards get swiped on the terminal. So I call Roth cash register (they are better than the people from “I am Your Retailer God” fame, learn the blog, learn it, live it, love it) and explain the problem, the back office seems to be online but I can't process card tranasactions. They do their remote thing via logmein.com, during which time they decide to download all of the windows updates. There were like nine of them, but it means the back office must be rebooted when it is done, which takes all of the registers offline upstairs. We go through that process and after the back office reboots, everything can't connect to the internet again. It was like Groundhog Day, I have already lived through this once. The funny thing was though that Brian's computer was working fine, the rest of them sucked ass. So they tell me maybe we have a loose cable someplace, and perhaps we do. I begin pawing around at different cables and what not when I see a modem hidden away behind the tower for the back office computer. I replugged that in and everything came back. And on the 8^th day, Matt gave us internet and it was glorious.

But even getting the internet back didn't solve all of the problems, I had to reset the credit card processing in the back office, which needed restarted after a reboot, and restart all of the registers upstairs which were still reading offline because they never connected to the software updater and were running on a temporary license until the problem was fixed.

The thing was, with the system down I wasn't able to run an accurate sales report, or get credit card numbers from before the system crashed on Monday. So now I am rushing to get things done, because the bank closes at 4pm and I am running up against a deadline here. Money in the bank means I can cover our outstanding checks, that is usually a good thing. So I scramble and get the money counted and run to the bank I get there with literally 5 minutes to spare before they close. Meanwhile it has been raining all day, so I am now sporting the drowned rat look that will be all the rage at Paris fashion shows this fall. “See how his soaked t shirt shows off the fattness of his stomach, oooh, ahhh.”

I get back to work, go outside and have a cigarette and that was when it struck me, I looked up and saw the clouds were blocking out the tops of the buildings. The fog for the oncoming zombie apocalypse was rolling in, and on the last day of the Blood Moon no less. Don't ask me what a blood moon is, I have no idea, a moon that is having its time of month perhaps. The only thing I know is two of these days are down, one to go. Please let it go smoothly.