This is part 9 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.
"In the meantime, John called a friend who had a shop in another city. His schtick is similar to mine, but he had somewhat more experience with networks.
"By now, I'm not hopeful, but at least this guy shows up when promised and is careful not to be condescending (probably warned ahead of time by John).
"As per the usual, it takes me about an hour to get him to believe that what I'm telling him is true. He fastens on authentication as the issue. I point out that the receiving computers are showing no attempt at authentication and the error messages are indicating path not found, the traffic just isn't going there. He's sure it's authentication, though, and spends an hour or so trying different incantations to fix that. Finally, he allows as how he doesn't know how to fix the authentication issue and recommends we call Microsoft.
"Sigh. By now, it's near the end of the day and I'm significantly burned out so I say I'll do it tomorrow. A call to Microsoft is my very, very last resort and I've done it only twice before and was disappointed both times, as both times the genius at Microsoft didn't figure anything out that I hadn't already figured out. ("You're right. Our docs say it works. It ought to work, and it just doesn't. OK, well we can't really charge you for that...") "
I think I'm beginning to understand the pattern. The nasty wizards will flock together and only very strong magic will defeat them.
More to follow...
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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