This is part 10 retelling the end of CDFW's battles with his company's network demons. You can read about CDFW's travails in the CDFW arcs. Part 1 began this CDFW recounting his experiences with various routers and we learned in Part 2 that CDFW would rather work with routers than Microsoft Word. We left CDFW with a non-operational router in Part 3 and he learned he could recite incantations in Part 4. Part 5 left him battling with evil wizards and he went to the king for help in Part 6.
The evil wizards were attempting to create alliances in Part 7 and in Part 8 the king called the evil wizards out. Part 9 had CDFW entering the lair of the ... whatever... We and CDFW learned in Part 10 that not all good wishes are beneficial.
"Though she'd spent 45 minutes on the issue, the Microsoft lady allowed as how she wasn't going to charge us for the call. I think this was to forestall my screaming over the telephone, "You designed it to do WHAT?!?!"
"But I think the whole experience is summed up best by the only exchange I had with the Microsoft lady. She asked to speak to me and the other guy reluctantly gave up the phone. She wanted to check some of the router settings. So, since she had linked up and was controlling the computer, I began to explain to her how to get to the web interface for the router.
""No, no," she said, "I'm not trained on this router. We need to speak with your router team."
""My router team?" I replied, thinking she must be joking.
""Yes." she replied. Apparently Microsoft people don't joke.
""I guess that would be me," I said, and the other guy started frantically trying to get the phone back.
"Sigh.
"When the phone call was finished, the guy who'd spent three hours of my time chasing DNS and authentication issues veritably strutted around the office as though to say, "Aren't you glad you brought me in to fix this," but all he was actually saying was "And you ought to be using this to do that and you ought to change that over to this and you should be doing this with your that. . ." yada, yada, yada.
"Well, I must run now. Need to go string together some more garlic necklaces. I like to be prepared for network problems, ya know."
Funny thing...as I'm putting this arc into the blog publishing system I got another email from CDFW. Those garlic necklaces might be needing some help.
Do you have any thoughts on CDFW's situation? Any experiences similar or otherwise? I'd like to know. Thanks.
I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.
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