Yesterday. It seems so far away… And I really don’t know what to say, to explain, the screw up that was, yesterday.
Can you tell I’m trying to laugh? About a month ago my boss tells me that he’d fed up with TelePacific’s nickle and diming. Setting us up with voicemail… and then giving us a toll number in which to get them. The associated little charges like that that drove my boss crazy. So he decided to have us return to the local bell, AT&T. He was on the phone with them for hours hammering out the deal, and constantly asking questions about service. So I assumed he had set everything up right and it’d be a somewhat painless switchover, I was wrong.
D-Day, the day the tech came to switch over the lines. He started while I was at a meeting and I assumed everything had gone well… until later that afternoon. Then we started getting the phantom voicemails (A little background, we had started getting issues with missing voicemails with Telepacfic, yet another issue, and they had arranged to have all voice mails to be emailed to us also) in which the phones would not ring, but a voice mail would appear in our email. And customers would call complaining that our fax machine was down. On top of all that, We found out that AT&T hadn’t placed the DSL order like they where supposed too, or the voicemail. So after hours of phone calls… Don left to go see his daughter graduate, and we expected to have things be fixed.
Thursday… Don is gone, we’ve no idea how to reach our voice mail if we have it, and I’ve got more phantom voice mails coming in (we had 8 while Laura was at lunch right in the middle of the day… and confusing the hell out of me). So I call AT&T and start work on the voice mail boxes, only to soon realize they don’t understand the phantom voice mails, and the voice mail was set up wrong with no extension boxes. 4 hours of being on the phone with them (5 calls) we get that fixed… but with phantom messages still coming in. And to top off the day, the DSL kit comes in, and it’s a modem for a single PC and the set up is talking dynamic… when we’re supposed to have 5 static IPs.
Friday was crazy… insane crazy. I was fighting multiple jobs and still dealing with the phones. Plus I was doing catch up from the previous day. But it was also Conco de Mayo so when the day ended it was going home to Margaritas and Steak tacos.
After a good weekend Monday seemed ok, work was getting done, I was still getting the Phantom voice mails and it was frustrating some of our customers… but it was getting worked out.
Tuesday Don returned and we started going through the issues. He tried delay calling AT&T (always takes hours) but we at least got down exactly which customers could not reach us. And I figured out they where all Telepacific customers. In other words Telepacifc was messing with us, and since the lines where not conencted people went immediately to voice mail, and the fax didn’t work for them.
Wednesday… I don’t know what it is with this day. Last week it was the start, this week it was the omgwtf day. AT&T turned on the DSL that day…. on the line to the fax machine. Not the dedicated line for the DSL that goes to my office and the switch. Also I had Don call and find out the IP addresses for our static IPs. Well it went downhill from there. First they couldn’t find record of the dedicated telephone line for the current DSL (Yes Telepacific HADN’T turned it off yet) and they said it would take 3 weeks to get it fixed. Also they confirmed the order was wrong, and we had standard dynamic instead of 5 IP static. And to add to injury Don had me call Telepacific to see if we could get the phone number for the DSL line, and I got told why should we help you. You switched to AT&T, and 20 minutes after that the DSL was turned off.
It’s amazing how inter-related the DSL modem had been. It also had been the DHCP server, so when it went off we had computers that couldn’t talk to each other. And in some cases where in their own little world. As the Computers with the static IPs could talk to each other but when the modem went down all the dynamic Address computers had different subnets. So we went into emergency mode. I had been sending out jobs when we lost it, so I packaged everything up, got some important infomation and copied all that onto a thumb drive grabbed my bosses credit card and took off. Frist stop, Staples; I normally don’t bother with them, but ehre in town when you are in a hurry, they normally have it. And the prices aren’t that bad. And we needed a router. Not just a basic router, but one that could handle static open addresses and dynamic private addresses. Not an easy task… most packaging doesn’t show the info I needed and sales people telling me that any of them can do it… doesn’t ring true. SO I noted some model numbers and went home. First I sent out the jobs, wasting a bit of paper on paper backups (proof jobs where sent out). Then I started searching, and finnally found a great site which detailed all the possible options, if it had them and what protocols it actually supported. After all that I ended up walking out with a Linksys WRT54GS, which had a Command Line interface and which if nothing else I could just muck with the table manually. After all that, I got back and after lunch started prepping to install everything. Don was tracking someone down to jumper the fax line into my office, and I was going to get it all running. The ironic thing was that the Advertising guy that Don was working with had at one time down telephone repair, and had the tools. And he was the one who ended up getting us going again in about 5 minutes.
It’s the minor things that bite. With the new modem and router, I was forced to use a different subnet (mainly the modem). Not a huge issue, but I was at work till past 7pm getting different versions of Windows talking to each other again and all on the same netblock. The next morning was spent getting the copiers and other network enabled devices all on the same netblock, and this will all have to be done again in 2 weeks when AT&T comes out with a new router and the 5 statics. And to add to this, We’ve been having to wipe and reinstall Dons computer (yet again) because it “mysteriously” got messed up. I don’t know how or why he does it, but his PC has always been crashing, and has always been found with spyware & viruses on it. Though to be truthful, most people being told a file is a virus would stop and refuse or get a second opinion. Reinfecting yourself multiple times even when the antivirus says stop is… GAH!
Tags: Interesting, Networking, OpEd, Technology
