I love my job. Ever loved it, always will love it.
But if you ask me what the most annoying aspect of it is, then I would answer you that it’s stuff always breaking all around me.
Whatever I do, there is no guarantee that any defined thing will work like it’s expected to, it will break from one moment to another or it will never work. There are hardware failures, OS failures, software failures – each and every day I lose at least one or two hours due to stuff not working or suddenly stopping to work.
Let me give you an account of what happened since the beginning of 2009:
- When installing two previously configured servers at a collocation center, one didn’t start up at all (opening and reclosing the case fixed that) and the ESX server on the other machine refused to connect to the VMWare license server despite a working TCP/IP connection between them which turned out to be a missing host file entry despite connecting via IP-address.
- One day later, Outlook on a computer of someone I’m looking after the PC a bit decided to trash the .PST-file and I had to remotely guide (on the phone) the person to restore it from the backup.
- Yesterday, my Firebug suddenly stopped working. At least the console-object wasn’t any longer available in my scripts and the console itself didn’t work. Reinstalling the Addon helped (WTF?)
- One of my two Vista Media Center PCs suddenly stopped to play any video file, despite me not doing updates on these machines to prevent stuff like this from happening. To this date I have no idea how to fix this.
- My Delphi 2007 installation just now decided to stop displaying the online help. Trying to fix that by reinstalling it ended with an Error message containing title and content of “Error”, but not after first completely uninstalling Delphi with no way of getting it back (you know… “Error” again). This was fixed by removing D2009 and then reinstalling 2007 and 2009 – a process that took 2 hours of installation time and another three to figure out what’s going on.
- When I was frustrated enough and wanted to vent (i.e. write this post), my WordPress just now decided to do something really strange to the layout of the “Add New Post” page which made it impossible to post anything. Disabling Google Gears and restarting the browser helped.
Our everyday technology is becoming more and more complex, thus causing more and more strange problems, requiring more and more knowledge and time to work around them. If we continue on that path, sooner or later it will be impossible to keep up with fixing problems popping up.
That will be the day when I’ll hopefully live on some island way off the net and all this stuff.
gnegg 