Another day...

The day started normal… like any other weekday. I was actually looking forward to being able to get some programming done and maybe even catch up with a bit of my accounts.

Got Alex out to school on time and the house was mine. I started preparing my accounts to start entering them in to the computer and, of course, the phone rings.

They day didn’t change much from there on. From 09:30 to 15:08 I was on the phone. I don’t mean I had one long call or even that I had a call, put down the phone and did something else and then had another call. I was on the phone, non-stop, from 09:30 to 15:08. I would be in the middle of a conversation on one phone line and the other line would ring, which I would not answer, and someone would leave a message. As soon as I would hang up one call I was calling back the next call and it continued like that throughout the day. I finally got up from my chair at 15:08 mostly because I was coming to the belief that I would soon wet my chair and that it would probably stain the leather which Desney would punish me for.

I can’t even remember all of the calls. One was from a client in Switzerland who’s hard disk is dying. We spent hours backing up the computer and then trying to figure out whether we get the disk replaced, which would require re-installing and reconfiguring everything and involve a certain amount of down time, or replace the computer. One of the calls was a client in Kentucky who is having problems with his laptop only to find that his anti-virus and firewall software has not been kept up to date and he was answering update questions NO rather than YES… That took a while to fix. Another was a client in London with problems with one of the database programs I wrote where a comma is in the wrong place and there is an extra line missing in between two sections. Life-threatening!

One of the fun calls in the middle was my mother who too was having computer problems but who is now back online and happy.

Picked up Alex at school (16:30) and got right back to work with more phone calls…

Finally got a break at dinner time and, to celebrate the fact that Jess survived her first day of brevet blanc exams , we cracked open a bottle of wine (Maison de Fleurie - Fleurie – Les Déduits 2001) which certainly helped. Most of the dinner conversation was about Jess’ exams which obviously Alex did not completely appreciate…

Now I come back down to my computer to catch up on the latest instalment of the email mystery ( http://www.emailmystery.com ) only to find out that their server is down and they are having difficulty with their computers. Why didn’t they call me? Everyone else did!