Beep beep.

Today at work was crazy. I’m going to break my rule and write about a work incident.

First, the backstory: I work for a fitness publisher. Boss #2 is one of the authors of said fitness books. We have a website with a forum that I moderate. Well, not really. If I moderated it, half the members would be banned for basic forum etiquette no-nos.

Either way, Boss #2 is… interesting. For the safety of my job I’ll leave it at that. Awhile back, he found a forum with people discussing his book and became obsessed with forums. He started posting these long posts. Eventually people started coming to our forum after reading them.

Boss #2 surfs and posts constantly. And he has these blind followers that hang on his every word and will constantly just kiss his ass. Muscle-jocks. Is that a thing? If it is, they are.

Okay, now I have to mention the second half of the backstory for those still with me (this a lot of backstory for a stupid work rant):

Our phone system has an overall page feature and when you page, it beeps twice and then you can speak. Boss #2 never took the time to actually learn any individual extensions, so he just overall pages. It’s a thing of legend. You’re constantly hearing, “BEEP BEEP. Claire, call John’s office.”

Or “BEEP BEEP XYZ, I’ve got so and so on the line and he wants to talk about that contract we’re thinking of signing and I need you to come up here and get in on the phonecall. He’s got a meeting in ten minutes so come up right now.”

How do these two relate? Other than in my twisted brain?

Today, around 1:00, I heard, “BEEP BEEP. Claire, call John’s office.” So I did. The website was apparently down, along with the forums.

That meant something was wrong with the server.

I would like to add that the NT Windows Server is a nightmare to deal with. I HATE WINDOWS. I know a bit about the OS, but when you get into SQL Server, I got nothing.

And I knew that if I didn’t get it up and running immediately, I was gonna get screamed at (literally, by the way). So I meandered to the server room, turned on the screen, noticed a few pop up windows related to our firewall software, took care of those, found the server to be working, told Boss #2, and went back to my desk.

10 minutes later: “BEEP BEEP. Claire, call John’s office.” The site was down again. This time I actually had to restart the machine. I checked and the site was back up, so I returned to my desk.

10 minutes later: “BEEP BEEP. Claire, the server’s down again.” I returned to the server room. By this time, I was getting a little panicky, because I knew if I couldn’t fix this, he would flip out, and I had no one on site to fix it. Visions of Geek Squad were dancing in my head.

I restarted the server again. This time, no dice. So I completely shut it down and gave it a 2-minute time out to think about what it had done.

I started it back up and it seemed to work. So I went back to my desk. Along the way all I heard was people calling out, “BEEP BEEP!” “BEEP! BEEP!” “BEEP! BEEP! Claire!”

30 minutes later, you guessed it: “BEEP BEEP. Claire, restart the server.” Back to the server room.

By this time, people were overall paging and then hanging up right after the beeps just to be funny. Uh huh. Hilarious.

To make a long story longer, I was running back and forth between my desk and the server room amidst real and fake “BEEP! BEEP!”s for hours. Finally around 4:30 I restarted the server again, and called up to tell him it was fixed. I also mentioned that there had been some large attacks to internet servers today and that I was having trouble with other sites as well. He accepted that.

I lie well.

Finally it was 6:15 and I was out the door. I stopped for a moment at the front desk to look at FedEx shipments going out.

All of the sudden: “BEEP BEEP. Claire, if you’re still here can you call John’s office.”

Sigh.

Sure enough, John wanted me to restart the server, as he was having problems.

I checked the site and it wasn’t even down. So I told John we were still up. And then ran like hell.

As I write this, it’s 8:30 and I’m half expecting a phone call any minute asking me to fix it.