Exchange Server go blewie!!

Here I sit at the office hoping that the restore I’m doing from tape will get the exchange server up and running. Please oh please let this happen.

I got into work with the news that email was down. This was at 7:30am it’s now 6pm and I’m still working on it. Thank God for backups. This has kind of been how my week has been going.

The beach was fun last weekend. Not sure I want to write about it though. There was some drama too.

Not feeling very chatty right now, just felt like putting something up on the blog.

Off to the beach this weekend

We’re off to Rehoboth beach this weekend. Our friends Rob and Carlos invited us down. Kiat and Tony will be there along with little David who is catching a ride from us. We’ll be leaving around 7-7:30 tonight to let all the traffic die down before we go. It’s a mad house getting over the Bay bridge on a summer Friday from DC. It should be good fun.

Dave will be in Jamaica next week for work. We’ll be getting back from Rehoboth late Sunday night and he’ll get up early on Monday and take off. It’s a crazy wild world but someone has to do it.

Today is my day not to touch anything at work. We don’t want to break something because it means that we would have to abandon our beach planes because I would have to work the weekend to fix it. So I’ve been told not to start any projects on Friday and not to change anything big unless we have a working weekend planned.

The hazards of being a computer geek.

Have a good weekend all.

Well, Blackberry do da, do da da daaaaaaa…..

What a fiasco! All I wanted to do was set up a blackberry for our new Atlanta guy. Really, that was it. Nothing special or anything like that.

Who knew it would take two weeks for me to get it done, and it only got done because I walked down to the Cingular-AT&T store in Georgetown to get a new SIM.

Here’s the story. We hire a new guy in Atlanta and he wants a blackberry. We get him a blackberry with an Atlanta phone number. The next day he emails me to say he wants his old phone number with the new blackberry.

It’s too late to change the number at this point so I figure we’ll fix it when I get the device. I always make sure I get the new blackberries so I can set them up correctly and then send them on their way.

I get the blackberry and then proceed to get very busy for the next couple of days and a weekend comes along. So I get back from fire island after the weekend and decide it’s time to get this thing going for our new guy. I call Cingular- AT&T and ask about moving the number over to the new phone.

No they can’t do it.

Why?

Well because he’s already a customer of Cingular&T but at a regional level and because of this he would have to call and “release” his account so that the National Business unit (the one we use) could take over the account.

Fine, GA boy, get in touch with your Cingular&T peps and I’ll get in touch with mine. Another two Days go by and I get an email from my GA guy saying that it’s all ready to be switched.

Now at this point you have to remember that I called before but didn’t think I had activated the old 770 number that came with the phone. But I had. Who knew.

I call and ask to have the phone account switched over to the corporate account. The nice rep says that will be fine can I wait while she fills out some forms. She comes back on and tells me that because it was a regional account that it would take 24 to 48 hours to have it added to our National account. At this point the poor guy has been without the device for almost two weeks. I tell the nice rep that I’ve had an easier time moving another carrier’s phone numbers over to our master account. She laughs and says that yes that’s true.

So we wait two more days.

I call today to finally get it set up and ready, four times I called! The first person can’t help me because the phone had been activated and the 770 number was attached to the new SIM card. I said that I hadn’t activated it, she says I had and that the only way to make it work is to send the device to GA guy and have him switch out the SIM card with his old unit’s SIM. I told her I can’t do that because I have to configure it before he gets it. I thank her and then hang up thinking that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

I wait about 20 minutes and try again.

I’m on the phone for about 7 minutes talking to another rep when all of the sudden I get this feeling that I’m talking to myself. And I was. The phone had been disconnected. I call back and the exact same thing happens.

At this point I’m thinking that the first rep had put a nasty gram in the file saying that I had been rude to her. I don’t think I was but I did hang up kind of fast.

So I call back and it happens again BUT this time the rep called me back. Turns out it was our phone system. It’s been on the sprits for about a month now. Anyway the nice rep tells me I can’t use the SIM because it’s associated with the 770 number. At this point I believe him. So I hang up, get on line and find the closest Cingular&T store. It’s just up the way. It happens to be a nice day so I take a walk up and get a brand new spanking SIM with no number attached. I get to the office, call back and get it all working!

It was only 10:15 at this point of the morning. It’s Fedexed and on its way to Atlanta Ga as I write this. What a relief.

Oh and I’m still sick.

Boy am I ready to go home. Cio

Tuesday and it's 100!

Ok, just enough time to update a little bit.

I’m in-between trying to fix my rental bathroom’s leak from above and getting the new Exchange server up and running and trying to port a phone number over to our corporate account. All I have to say is it doesn’t pay to get to work early to do this as no one is open. So I have to wait until 9 before I can get anything done.

So I’m at home yesterday with Bronchitis which I had all weekend but choose to ignore and go out with friends anyway because I’m an Idiot. So it didn’t get better. I stayed at home and took a real sick day which I never do. I usually will work from home if I’m not feeling well. This time I just vegged in-front of the TV and tried to feel better. During this time I would check my emails and this is when I found out that my Rental apartment had the leak. I just wasn’t up to confronting anyone about it yesterday.

So this morning I try to tackle it. The office isn’t open yet. I’ll call after 9 and hopefully someone will call be back. I hate our new condo association people.

I did however get in-touch with AT&T to move one of their numbers from a private account to our corporate account. Turns out to be harder then moving a number from another carrier. Because it’s a private number the person who has the number has to call and give permission for us to take over payment. Once this has happened I have to call and tell them we want to take over payment. They then tell me because he had a local account in GA and we have a national account it will take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours to do it. A-FREAKING-MAZING!!!!! So my guy in GA has to wait for another couple of days before he gets his blackberry. I don’t think he’s too happy about that.

Waiting for the new Exchange Server so I can finally build the new instillation and test it before we move it to the off-site location. It should arrive today. I should be busy for awhile getting it up and running. Still, the people that we’re moving over to have this uncanny nack of not getting back in-touch with us or not giving us information that they promise us on time. Not having a good feeling about this.

Ok, off to work again. Hopefully I’ll be able to update this a little bit more regularly.

Fire Island, we’ve made a friend.

Well we finally got invited to Fire Island, which if you don’t know is the gay Mecca beach community for all the New York boys, and we loved it!

It was pretty amazing actually considering that it rained most of the time we were there. We just relaxed. We never relax. I like relaxing.

We need to do it more often.

Anyway, I’m back at the office after an amazing weekend. We even flew on South West and it wasn’t that bad. My favorite comment about the service was “the trainee was so chirpy that it became my goal to make her cry” not that I would ever do that but it was still funny.

It did get sunny for a little bit on Sunday before we left to come home. We had a BBQ on the deck with about 12 people. All in all a good time.

I am however looking forward to have a weekend at our house this weekend coming up. Sometimes staying in for a weekend can be the best thing in the whole wide world.

We’re going to go see Mika at that 9:30 club on Tuesday night this week. I think I’m going to be late to work on Wednesday.

I’m not in a very big writing mood so I think I’ll stop here. I just felt like I was ignoring my little blog and had to write something.