What I Did For My Birthday

If you’ve been wondering where the heck I’ve been, yesterday was my birthday (29, so it’s all downhill from here). And the last 24 hours have been just a mess.

Had to go to work as I was supposed to meet with a bunch of people regarding phone and internet services for a couple offices. From both the Internet guys and Qwest guys, they said “We’ll be there between 9 and noon.” So I was planning on being out in Sunriver at 9. Internet folks showed up at 8:20, Qwest at 1:40. So killed off a good chunk of time trying to figure out what they were doing.

And some other phone guy from some local business phone system company (whose name I won’t mention) showed up at our office because somebody is renting out one of our offices and needed some new numbers ran to some jacks in that office. The guy who came decided to instead of talking to me, who knows what’s needed and what’s not in the building, talked to the real estate agent renting that space, who told him he could cut my network jacks in the room and use those pairs of wiring. Once I realized what he was doing, I told him to stop and put things back as they were.

While he finished up, my wife surprised me and brought me a Pilot Butte hamburger for lunch, which was very nice (Pilot Butte screwed up the order, however, and I ended up with their Tavern Burger, which is a heart-stopper, instead of just a basic cheeseburger). After going back to the office, I come to find out that the office’s DSL line is down — and it’s been down since right after that guy monkeyed with our phone closet. Go figure. I called BendTel to make sure it wasn’t something on their end and it wasn’t and never is as their stuff Just Works. He was already back in Bend at that point, and said that if he needed me to come back out again, I’d have to call his main office. Call his main office, and it’s closed from noon to 1 for lunch. It’s 12:20.

We needed internet access for our online booking server to function (which is a big chunk of revenue), so I called the local cable company, asked if they could procure me a modem (they were closed from noon to 1, too, but I know how to get ahold of them). They could, so I ran a long string of coax cable from the TV jack to the server closet, got the office online, redirected DNS, and we were good to go. Sadly, I’m going to have to cancel our DSL service with BendTel, as they’re great, but our phone system and wiring in our office is too finicky and fragile.

And while all this was going on, I’m trying to copy data (unsuccessfully) from my new laptop to my old laptop so I can ship my new laptop back (broken LCD hinge post), and had to rebuild a busted credit card server whose motherboard went kaput. Never really had a chance to catch my breath.

Finally, after a chaotic eight hours when my phone rang pretty much nonstop all day long, I finally got to go home. We had a few people over for a small little birthday party, I got some money (I’m going to get a new watch and running shoes) and a new DS game, and then my wife and I went to dinner (just some basic Chinese), and came home — to find out our plumbing is all messed up and the toilets and bathtubs are backing up. So I went to the store, got some Draino, dumped it down, let it sit, ran hot water after it, didn’t help. And all that greasy food was starting to get to me, and I need to use the toilet. Remember that scene from Ace Ventura, Pet Detective? You didn’t want to go in there, either, as we couldn’t flush.

So after hugging the toilet and not sleeping most of the night (and calling in to work sick), I got up at the crack of dawn this morning to see if I could get a plumber over to clear out the drain. I know I had somebody with “Rooter” in their name that wasn’t “Roto” before, and they were pretty cheap, so I called Mr. Rooter first. They wanted $300 basically to do anything. Then called Handy Rooter, and it was much more reasonable, and he’s up on our roof snaking our lines as we speak. So hopefully I’ll be able to take a shower after this is all said and done.

Then I’m going back to bed.

Happy birthday to me, indeed.