B365V3.20 - My Verizon-like body

So, a couple of weeks back I self diagnosed myself with a case of strep throat.  I did this without the advice or approval of a medical professional, but with experience of having strep throat in the past.  I had all of the symptoms, sore throat, check, achiness and soreness, check.  The problem being I am the only person that can do my job at work, so I soldiered on, logging 20 work days in a 21 day span.

When the sore throat subsided, compliments of steady diet of aspirin and cough/sore throat syrup, I figured the worst of it was over, but then I woke up one day and my calf muscles ( yes, my pillsbury dough boy like frame has some muscles underneath ) felt like a Charlie horse was forming underneath each of them.  This was followed by my hip getting sore enough that I would hobble around my apartment like an old man. Follow that up with about a week of chest pain and a week of stomach pain and aspirin has become my new best friend.  I am all about pain management these days, as even rest doesn't seem to help all that much. Remember that 20 out of 21 day work stretch, day 21 was spent not moving as much as possible.  I literally laid in bed all day, not that it helped all that much.

My body has literally become the embodiment of our Verizon service at work.  We use them for our phone and Internet service.  Last Thursday morning for some unknown reason, our internet service quit working, so I placed a service call Thursday to try and get someone out to fix it.  I also called our "in" with Verizon, a technician we know who is familiar with our set up ( which is a convoluted mess to be sure) but I believe he is one of the workers that was on strike.  So Brian called Verizon in hopes of getting a service call to our location, they said they would be out some time Friday.  Friday comes and no one shows up, I call them again on Saturday, they put in a new service ticket ( for some reason they had closed the one from Thursday).  They sent a copy of the service ticket to the company email, which does me no good since I have no internet access at work.  Brian checks the email from home, they put the service request in for May 31 st.   Yes they planned on getting around to us 12 days after the original phone call.  This, of course, pissed Brian off and given he can make threats I can't like pulling our service and what not best to let him rail away on the phone.  His efforts on Saturday were more productive than mine, he got an agreement for someone to come out on Monday and he got them to send what they call a jet pack, which is a device that allows you wireless access, free of charge, until the problem was resolved.  Monday a technician shows up, he installs a new  router but we still have no internet.  He said he would be back on Tuesday to finish up.  Tuesday comes, turns out their technician called off, so no one was coming out, but what did happen was after they had installed the new router they had knocked off our in house network, meaning our registers were no longer able to communicate with each other or the back office, so I couldn't even run a simple sales report.

Bad enough our register software has automatic updates built into it, as long as it can access the updates it keeps the software license updated as well, without Internet access you get put on a 7 day temporary license, so each day this problem wasn't fixed we were ticking another day off of the temporary license.   I put in a call to our register people, Roth, who were able to fix the license problem on the last day that our temporary lincense would work, and they rebuilt the in house network Verizon fucked up during their lone visit.  I could run reports again, yay!  Meanwhile Verizon had yet to show up to finish what they started, Monday's visit was followed my a call off in Tuesday and no one showing up on Wednesday.  Brian was hoping this jet pack thing they were going to send him would help, I was less optimistic, our registers are not wireless, so sending us wireless access is like putting spinny rims on a Yugo.  One of his complaints when he called today was that nobody had shown up yet to fix our problem (8 days after the problem was reported) and this promised jet pack hadn't arrived.  Verizon assured us that it had, Alex had signed for it.  That would be fine except we have no one employed by us at this time with the name Alex.  Turns out they shipped it to our old store, Gus Millers, so Brian had to run over there and fetch it.

He brought it back to the store and after some personal training, I figured out how to set it up ( in the land of the technologically blind, I am the one eyed man, so I am king) and the jetpack did exactly what I thought it would do, it gives us wireless in the office as does nothing to fixing our existing internet problem, which currently inhibits our ability to take credit cards.  But at least I can play on my tablet now at work without walking down the street to steal wifi from Starbucks.

I read online this evening that the Verizon strike appears to be over.  Given how inadequate their service was during the strike, I can imagine the employees are able to write their own ticket, though God knows what kind of clusterfuck they will be walking into when they get back on the job, with projects like ours already 8 days behind schedule.

I would like to say tonight has been the most pain free I have been in a couple of weeks.  Perhaps I was suffering from Verizon sympathy pains, or perhaps the 6 aspiring I took at work and the two I took at home after work are doing their pain management best, but it is nice to not feel like you are being stabbed in the stomach all day long ( my most recent malady, which has been the case for the past week now).  I couldn't even sleep without taking aspirin beforehand, at least without waking up a dozen times through the night in agonizing stomach pain.  It would be enough to almost swear off of my #itsmyyear hashtag, but over the past couple of weeks I did get a couple of free hockey tickets to the Eastern Conference Final  ( Pittsburgh vs. Tampa Bay, Game 2) and I did hit a scratch off ticket for $400 last Saturday, so life hasn't been completely shitty.

Anyway this should make up for not writing in a while.