Debs stages of problem solving.

I finally managed to fix the jobs that have been broken since last Thursday's late night hard drive replacement extravaganza. Hooray! As Weetabix would say it was a problems that was "beating me up and calling me Nancy". In the end the problem was kind of obscure. Seems that in restoring to the new disks from the backup, the DOS name of a directory changed from UFACSU~1 to UFACSU~2. A small but significant issue. The damn thing couldn't run because it couldn't find it's .INI files. Geeze.

I definitely had to go through all of my problem solving stages to get to that one. First I curse, yell or zone out. I sputter, fuss and accomplish nothing. Second I throw out any old obvious thing I can think of with no analysis. Finally I start to think again and analyze what is going on step by step. That's when I find out what's wrong. Somehow, though, I can't seem to skip the first two steps and just get down to business.

This problem was exacerbated by my lack of computer from Tuesday morning to Thursday morning. Then what I really wanted to do on Thursday was set my machine back up, not solve problems. That's when I started just trying things. It wasn't until today that I managed to get the brain re-engaged. My machine is nearly back to "normal". I'm only missing one application at this point, and the guy in charge of it is missing the cd so I'm not sure how I'll get that up and running.

The 3 things I've learned in this experience are: 1)Keep every damn thing on the server where we pay people to keep complete backups. 2) If you get a short chance to save things don't forget to get your favorites and look at how your custom setup are done. I had some spiffy desktop icons that would start applications with all sorts of flags set. They were set up 3 years ago and now I'll be damned if I can remember what any of the flags were. I never needed to use them (they were in the icon) so now I can't remember them. Which brings me to 3) it's amazing what you can forget how to do in 3 years time. I am now documenting some of the stuff that I took for granted. I have had to wrack my brain for some of this stuff and swallow my pride and call tech support for the rest of it.

I mean geeze I always used my favorites to get to our private key control site. I never knew the address of the damn thing. Now I don't have the favorites and I'm begging the Verisign guys for help. Funny thing is he didn't know it off the top of his head either, so I don't feel as bad.

What a week.

Oh and the irony de jour is that all the Tuesday chaos was for a tour today that of course got postponed until April. So we trashed one system and wrecked havoc on the users for no good reason at all. Sometimes bossman is a jerk.

TGIF!