What I am trying to creatively say here is that this has been an absolutley AWFUL morning. Our company had an outage over the weekend, and this morning, the proverbial shit sort hit the proverbial fan. The majority of the issues this morning weren\'t due to the outage over the weekend, but added a considerable amount of \"What If\" to the whole equation. That sort of thing makes it really hard to troubleshoot if you\'re always second guessing everything due to some \"unknown\" being tossed into the pot.

Needless to say, two hours and a thermos of coffee later, we\'re back in business with at least one of the issues. There are plenty more things that need to be worked out however and today is a short day for me. That\'s good in that I already feel like I\'ve worked an entire day, but that is bad cause I am gonna have loads to do tomorrow.

This past weekend though was good so I should\'ve expected and adventure this morning. Carrie and I had her sister over to watch Olivia for us on Saturday while we went and took in a movie. (By the way, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was pretty damned good). It was the first time we\'ve been away from Olivia short of a quick dinner back in December when we missed out timeslot for seeing \"Phantom of the Opera\" downtown. Apparently our little girl was an angel and really I think Carrie and I were quite relieved. We both had visions of her screaming her head off the entire time we were gone. However, we returned to a quiet and peaceful house. Carrie\'s sister even got Olivia to sleep. *I* can\'t even get her to do that...*sigh*

The only other thing worth mentioning about our weekend was the fact that our Charter internet service was down nearly the whole weekend. I actually had to call them and, here\'s the good part, sit through over 30 minutes of recorded voice walk me through checking everything. Now, most of you know me, and you know that I do this sort of thing for a living. I had already checked everything this friendly little voice was telling me. It was one of those voice response systems that recognizes what you say to it so from purely a \"geek factor\" point of view, it was cool, but from an \"I already checked that shit because I am smarter than you\" point of view, it was annoying. No amount of hitting zero, saying \"there\'s a problem\", or telling it to fuck-off seemed to get me any closer to talking to a real person.

At long last I was connected with a live person, (once the system realized that it couldn\'t help me...) and they were able to schedule someone to come out and replace the modem tomorrow. My gripe is this...I had no way out, no option, nothing to get away from this HAL 9000\'esque computer bitch. I had to sit through elementary troubleshooting for 30 minutes in order to find out what I already knew. There needs to be an \"If your smarter than we are press 0 or say shut the hell up\" to continue.