Mike's musings

Withdrawal symptoms

Getting into work took nearly three quarters of an hour longer than usual today, as the (temporary) traffic lights on the Milton Interchange from the A14 had died, and noone was letting people on the slip-road from the West-bound A14 onto the roundabout. Not that you care about the details, but take it from me, it was very dull. (Note to self - how often have I used the word "dull" in this blog so far? Si reckons it's a defining Mike word - so much so that he's started using it, to his chagrin - but I don't _think_ I've used it much so far.) When I did get into work, around 0950, I was still one of the first. Got my machine up and running. Changed the default route, as the normal route is pretty much down due to a Cisco box failing, and all was pretty much fine. Then changed the default route for a couple of cow-orkers (yes, it's intentional - do a google on it), and people started to trickle in.

All was well on this route for a while, until things started to get a bit treacly. Slow, slowww, sloowwwwwwwer. By lunchtime, it was pretty much unusable, and I was pleased that I wasn't expecting any important emails, and that I had a document to write which didn't require access to the Internet, as I had all the relevant information locally. But after a while, not being able to just check slashdot, knowing that all my IM contacts were down, not being able to send off a quick email: they all started to get to me. It was nice in a way, but it's amazing how cut off you feel if you're in a context where you _expect_ to be online, but aren't. I'm actually quite good at being on holiday without Internet access, or being out of touch for a while, but it's weird in the context of work. I'm young enough (and have been in the right sort of jobs) that since I left university, I've always been in employment in places where having Internet access is the norm, and being without has been a cause for (sometimes considerable) concern. I've generally managed to steer clear enough of system admin roles that I'm not expected to be the one to fix these sort of problems, but tried to keep close enough to the people who are fixing them that I can get information and provide the odd bit of help from time to time. People who know me may well say "help? Huh!" or similar, but a combination of knowing what's going on at the technical level and generally running a Linux box with enough useful tools that I can do some diagnostics from a "standard" user's perspective can provide a little non-hindering-type assistance (hopefully).

It got to the stage that people were going home early in order to have some Internet access, while some people (myself included) started using 3G phones/cards to access the Internet, which was fine. Rather geeky, but if your boss does it first, then fine, I guess. I was the only one doing it via Linux, though... Oh, but I'm a sad geek.