Yesterday I made what turned out to be the fatal mistake of plugging my work laptop into a projector. I know! GASP! As a result, this was my day today:
1. Arrive at my desk at around 8:30 a.m.
2. Immediately call the JSC help desk in Houston, which automatically transferred me to the NASA Shared Services Center located in Mississippi. Since I couldn’t even get to a log-in screen, they processed my help ticket as a work stoppage which in theory gives it higher priority. Then they passed it back to the IT people at JSC in Houston.
“Can you tell me when someone will be able to help me?
“No.”
3. About 20 minutes later, I got a call from the JSC people saying they got my ticket and will send someone out.
“Can you tell me when that will be?”
“No.”
4. I sit around distracting my officemates and checking webmail on my personal laptop, which I brought precisely because I knew I’d be wasting a whole day.
5. Around 10:30, an IT guy finally arrives. Hooray! He begins trying to fix my computer.
6. I continue distracting my officemates and doing as much as I can on webmail. Which isn’t much.
7. Around 12:30, the IT guy pronounces the hard drive dead. Fortunately, my last backup was yesterday morning. I breathe a sigh of relief. He calls someone else to get me a “loaner” laptop and says he’ll come back when he gets it.
“Can you tell me when that will be?”
“No.”
“Will it be today?”
“I hope.”
8. Around 1:30, he returns with a loaner laptop. Hooray for that happening fairly quickly! He boots it up and starts installing the backup client so we can recover my data.
9. It’s 2:30. The backup client installation still shows 0% and says it’s “synchronizing files.”
10. It’s 3:30. The backup client installation still shows 0% and says it’s synchronizing files.”
11. The IT guy has to go, so he makes sure that I know how to restart the backup software if I need to, i.e. if this one never finishes and I have to cancel it out. I want to curse at him, but instead I thank him, since I recognize that none of this ridiculousness is actually his fault, and that he’s actually tried his best to be helpful.
12. At 4:00, the backup client does something! It says it’s backing things up and is 3% finished!
13. It’s 4:25, and my ride home is ready to go. The backup client has stalled…and still says 3%.
14. I cancel the damn thing, and shut the computer down. It forces me to install 4 Win7 updates before actually shutting down.
15. I am now at home and attempting to start the whole process over again in hopes that somehow I can get my data back on to my laptop instead of just on backup servers somewhere.
Your government at work!