I read somewhere that a quirk of memory causes it to reset when a person walks through a doorway. It’s not usually an issue for me since the things I need to do occur in one place or another. If I need to do something work related, I’m usually already at work. If it’s something at home, well, I’m usually home when it occurs to me. Rarely do I need to think about something at work that I’ll need to cover at home.
But, we had a system that wasn’t behaving properly at work and my boss wanted me to test at home on my own network – we talked about it just before I left the office.
And there are a lot of doors to go through to get outside. I made it through the first door, repeated the thing I needed to check out loud, then made it through the second door. By the third door, the memory had been blasted out of my head by a reset and I totally forgot about it.
Until this morning. I was lying in bed, arguing with the clock about what time it really was, when the memory popped back up into my head. I drifted in and out of sleep, thrashing about in my head as I wrestled with that memory to keep it from slipping away.
The alarm clock finally won and I got up and went right to the computer.
Except the site I needed to check wouldn’t come up in IE. The site in this case being the University of Akron homepage. Bing just sat there like a lump and couldn’t even be bothered to give me an error message. Chrome and Google fared no better – it looked like we were down.
I headed into work so I could check on things and report in. Home page still down, but so was the support site. And yahoo. And Google. It was the worst – the network was down.
I verified that it was not just me and some network disrupting karma that I’d built up. Nope, it was real.
So, now, we wait for the network crew to get us back online. And for a web guy, that’s a quiet time. Nothing we can do to help – and not much we can do for work.
And it feels odd. Like some internal organ that isn’t quite there, but you didn’t know you missed it until you needed that odd bit of food digested.
Well, I could write. Except my favorite editor is online so I’m in notepad. I could listen to music, but youtube isn’t accessible. So, I’m listening to the same few songs I have saved on my machine.
I can get to 3g on my phone, but I’m wary of network overages – and the Wifi is down.
The computer center is un-naturally still and there’s a sort of hush over things – like the wake of a natural disaster as we wait for news of rescue or another aftershock.
And it’s all so damn odd. I mean, really, humanity has existed for a very long time without a network.
But for the web geeks, well, we might as well be banging rocks together.
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In happier news, I started my Halloween costume construction in earnest last evening. It felt really good to see the shape in my head begin to have a physical reality. Kind of amazing, really, to be able to see something in the mind that doesn’t yet exist and then make it exist.
I still have a long way to go, but the shape is there. This might be the last year of doing this – it’s a lot of work – but in any case I’m going to try and make it a good one.
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Finally, a language lesson from my nieces. The oldest one came up with “focentrate” – a combination of focus and concentrate – a while back and used it again this past weekend. The younger invented “applecone” – her version of “pineapple”.
Consider yourself educated.
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And now we’re back up, so it’s time to get to work.