There are days, when I just can't deal with it.

Saturday, as I was tooling back from Boulder with a couple of friends, Buehler called complaining because the VPN was out. He'd gone to the office and wanted me to walk him through fixing it.

I know, in a vague sort of way, that we have a VPN. I even know what a VPN is (a Virtual Private Network) and what it does (it lets people access the hardware here in the office, even when they're somewhere else) but those basic concepts are pretty much where my knowledge about, and interest in, our VPN stops.

If there's some physical thing in the server closet, amid that wilderness of tangled wires and stacked boxes, that is an actual VPN Controller, it's a surprise to me. If there's a button you can push or a thingy you can reboot to make it work when it gets stubborn, the location of said magic gizmos is a mystery to me.

Anyhow. I like Buehler, so I walked him through rebooting the Exchange server (the only thing I know how to explain over the phone and "a case of the blind leading the blind" doesn't even begin to explain how scary that idea is), including managing to explain to him how to change the "channel" on the weird black box that controls whether you're looking at the Exchange server or one of three other computers there in the closet. I waited for and took the inevitable second phone call because he'd forgotten to ask for the password, and then I forgot about the whole mess.

I mean, when he didn't call back I assumed all was well, but I come in today to find out that he was calling and IMing Bernie all weekend about the problem. (If calling me for network tech support constitutes "desperate" then calling Bernie has to qualify as " apocalypse imminent." The man can't even change the "view" on his documents in Word.)

And, yes, today, the entire office's internet access is out. It wasn't the VPN at all.

Ninety minutes later, I've rebooted everything in sight (including the box labeled "do not turn off"), most things three times, with no success.

When the Magic Of Reboot fails me, I'm pretty much stuck.

I have a vague idea that we have our internet access through Qwest. A close examination of the little modem box reveals that it does, in fact, have a Qwest label. Aha!

(At this point, Buehler asks if Bernie's "tech guy" isn't coming in this morning. I have no idea. If the two of them arranged for this over the weekend, that information wasn't passed to me. Besides, while I have much faith in TechBoy's abilities, I doubt that he's going to be able to fix a Qwest outage, you know? It has to be a Qwest outage. All of the little boxes are hooked up and all of the little lights are a happy green.)

(I should mention that Bernie called and said that their dog died last night so he's taking a sick day.)

After explaining all of this to Buehler, I am reduced to the primitive expedient of paging through a hard-copy phone book. I find a number. I call Qwest, fight my way through the debris of voicemail options to get to a Real Person and--get stuck.

I don't have our account number. I don't know which of the three companies sharing this suite the account was set up under. I don't even know the "main" phone number the account would have been set up under.

Moe, the guy who used to do freelance and contract software coding work for us, set the whole Qwest thing up two or three years ago and of course he's long gone. Also, while Moe's a great guy, documentation and information-sharing weren't really his strong points.

Eventually I bully the truly kind and helpful woman on the phone into admitting they're having an outage. I cannot force her to tell me if it includes this building or not though. Also, we're not the only Qwest customers in the building, but apparently it's possible that some of us are having an outage and some of us are not.

(During the time I'm trying to talk on the phone to Qwest, Buehler is interrupting me with questions of such earth-shattering importance as, "what is today's date," and "did you get the weekend mail yet.")

In the end, Qwest-Lady says the outage, if that's our problem, could last for up to 24 hours and if we still don’t have internet access tomorrow, the problem could be with our modem, so find our account number or something that she can track in her system and they'll help us trouble-shoot it.

I hang up and search the office. There are no bills from Qwest. It seems that in some peculiar fashion, we've managed to have Qwest DSL service for the last two years without ever receiving a bill. I can understand that it might have been set up for auto-pay to a credit card or something, but I cannot understand how a mailing-happy, paper-obsessed company like Qwest failed to send us any kind of paper bill/reminder/notification in all of that time.

I've been in the office for 2-1/2 hours by this point, and the only work-related (as in "actually my job") thing I've done all day was the two-second interval when I completely failed to send an email to a client because the internet access was out.

Also, I'm facing the knowledge that if it's the modem, it's just going to be out until Bernie moves the office, because I have no information and no documentation that will get us any kind of technical support to fix it.

In the meantime, I'm still wearing an antique contact lens in my left eye, so the world is half-hazy and entirely off-balance, making me just slightly queasy if I try to focus on anything smaller than a school bus. The pharmacy is calling to complain because I ordered prescription refills and never picked them up. The bookkeeper is calling to complain because I haven't deposited the expense reimbursement check that was written to me two weeks ago.

If I were a drinker, this is the moment I'd be reaching for the nearest bottle. But I'm not, so I'm munching morosely on today's "approved" diet snack (soy nuts), doing the bookkeeping, and looking forward to the moment half an hour from now when I need to get up, go home, and check my email.

(Posted from home, later that same day.)