In which everything happens at once

[bunn]

 1)  Vet appointment with Yama and Mollydog.  Yama actually present and correct in time for appointment, hurray!

 2) checkup for Mollydog, new prescription

3) checkup for Yama, steroids and antibiotics for nose gunk issue

4) Letter for vet to sign off so that Az can have massage session with purple_witch 

5) Vet that last saw Az is on holiday.  But I persuade another vet to sign it instead without having to pay for an extra checkup, hurray!

6)  Driving home, find neighbour's (unspayed) staffy bitch in middle of road looking apologetic. 

7) back of car is already full of sighthounds, middle seat full of cat carrier.  Load staffy into front seat.  Get liberally kissed by delighted staffy in the process

8) drive home slowly and cautiously,  intoning 'Shelly!  STAY!'   Fortunately she is a nice little dog, and does. 

9) Unload cat.  Unload sighthounds.  

10) Borrow collar and lead from Az.  Let  out collar a long way, to fit round chunky Staffy neck (she's not wearing one)... 

11) Return staffy to neighbour's house and reclaim collar. 

12) Reprove neighbour's children sternly for shouting crossly at returning Prodigal Staffy: no wonder she doesn't want to stay there...

13) Back to house.  Sigh of relief.  Check internet.  No internet.  Arg.  Turn-it-off-and-on-again.  Check on other machines.  Still no internet.

14) rummage for ISP's phone number. 

15) call ISP.  Go into queue.  Broadband returns while am in queue, as quietly and mysteriously as it departed.  Ring off. 

16) Start to check email, but interrupted by text message from server monitor: site nonresponsive.  Aaaaargh.  Check sites. Site monitor has a point. 

17) Call server admin.  Wait in queue.  

18) Ask server admin: var partition full again?  No.  Exciting new DNS rollout has been ballsed up.  Being unrolled again as we speak.  Joy.  Still, at least others are suffering, it's not just me.  Somehow this makes it seem less bad.

19) Resist temptation to suggest pointedly that a good time to do critical stuff like this would be 3am, not 3pm.  Ring off. 

20) in the presence of technology disaster, flee to LJ to tell world my woes.

21) unable to post rant to livejournal as internet connection down again!

22) Call back to ISP. Queue. 'Call is important to us and should be answered shortly' for half an hour...  

23) Scream and run away into woods to live as a hermit. 

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

If I was in this situation, number 21 would be the most grrsome. Even a mild to moderate apocalypse would be bearable as long as one still had LJ to rant about it on.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That was the point where I started to feel the universe was taking the pee a bit.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Now I understand what you were alluding to on Facebook. The horror of customer non-service strikes. Shelly sounds like a nice dog despite unappreciative young humans.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Shelly is a really lovely dog - I fear she is just a bit too much dog for her owners to manage. She'd be fabulous in a home that was able to really put all that intelligence, power and energy to work, rather than letting her get bored and use it trying to find new ways of getting out to explore.

I hate it when people shout at their dogs for running off and the dogs cringe. It's so counterproductive! The kids did seem to take the point that shouting would only encourage her to run away more though, though how long that will stick... who knows.

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

Oh don't you love those queues! And if it was then possible to understand what is said, it might even be worth it.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I have an advantage on the understanding what's said, as I used to work for an ISP and have done a little bit of being at the other end of the calls! On this occasion I gave up before I got through though, as it became clear from the sheer length of the queue that there must be some sort of major network problem and all their customers were calling at once.

I do wish they'd put something on their queuing system to that effect though. 'Your call is important to us' much less useful than, say 'everything is currently broken, we expect it to be fixed by 5:30, don't panic'.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

All that and no LJ? No wonder you're grumpy!

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

'You call is important to us', repeated every 30 seconds as you slowly lose all will to live, is really, really rubbing salt in the wounds...

'We're not that fussed really, but hang on if you've got nothing better to do' might work.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

'Your call is important to us' still better than 'is your data secure? do you worry about uptime?' when you are *phoning to report a sodding outage that the supplier in question has failed to prevent*. That's really adding insult to injury!