Gonna be a golden day, what with the snow, the sleet, the ice, and the idiots.

I arrive at the office at 8:31. The phone is already ringing. It's Bernie. He's checking in. Do we have internet access at the office?

No.

I checked my email at home before I came in, so I tell him to go check his web-mail. A client needs a change in a .pdf file Bernie sent them. He needs to do that while he still has internet access at home.

It's a typo, okay? He spelled a word wrong. It's a two-second fix. But, no. He objects to making this change. He wants me to do it and then email him the new Word document to convert into a pdf.

I remind him that I have no internet access. He says he'll "try" to make the correction but it might have to wait.

I am completely at a loss as to why he would not be able to fix a typo in a Word document and then select the menu option that converts the file to a .pdf (he's done it a hundred times before) but I can clearly see that whenever the time comes when we have internet access again, the first thing I'm going to wind up doing is fixing this typo and then emailing the document to him.

As clearly as if he'd said it, I can tell that he has decided is hard and complicated and he doesn't want to be involved. He also as much as said that since the client's original email came to me and he wasn't copied, it wasn't his job to fix the mistake.

He has the necessary Word document since he's the one who emailed it to me originally. He has the only computer that will do the conversion. He has experience doing it. Why, suddenly, is this all just too traumatic for him to deal with?

Apparently his internet access at home is slow. I refrain from mentioning that it's not as slow as at the office where it's stopped.

Next up:

Considering that I had a 15-minute conversation about his responsibilities with Buehler yesterday, before he left the office at noon, I guess I should be impressed that it took him clear up until 3:30 yesterday afternoon to start calling Bernie and asking if "we" have fixed the internet access yet.

I talked with Bernie about this yesterday afternoon, when he called to ask why I had not gotten the internet access fixed. At that time I explained to him how no one but Buehler can provide the information required.

This morning, Bernie called to say that Buehler was inquiring about the access. Is it fixed? When I said, "no," he asked me to "call her" about it.

Her? Who her? The Access Goddess?

I explain, again, very slowly, that I need an account number or the primary phone number the account was set up under in order to call Qwest and get any assistance. This information has to come from Buehler and/or Moe.

I explain that it's completely ridiculous for Buehler to say that he has never gotten a bill from Qwest and that I told him, Buehler, quite plainly, what I needed yesterday, so it's no good him calling us today and wondering why I haven't done anything about it.

Bernie hangs up, calls Buehler and then calls me back. Buehler did talk to Moe, but he did not understand that he needed to get information from him so he didn't ask him the questions. I guess he just made a general inquiry after his health or something.

Now Bernie demands to know why Qwest cannot help us by tracking down our account by our address. I have no answer for this, not being in charge of how Qwest or any other company stores their own data. I assume, as I told him yesterday, that Qwest, being primarily a phone company, tends to use phone numbers to track accounts.

Bernie objects that we have lots of phones and surely one of those numbers will work. I point out that it's hardly reasonable to expect Her to sit on the phone with me for an hour while I rattle off the 20 "active" phone numbers into this office and have Her try them in combination with three different company names in an attempt to find our account.

Bernie decides to call Qwest himself. I wish him luck, decline to provide the phone number (he can do the same thing I did, look it up in the phone book) and actually do hope he can get this fixed. I miss my internet access.

Before he hangs up, Bernie asks if I've asked DiamondGirl about this.

No, I have not. She doesn't work here any more.

She hasn't worked here for over six months, and when she was doing contract work for us, you bitched her out for the number of hours she was charging, so she doesn't love you any more and is highly unlikely to offer you any free tech support on a system that someone else contracted to have installed in the office. (What I actually say is, "I don't have internet access." He says since I can't email her, can I send her an IM. I say, "no, I do not have internet access.")

In the end, he decides to work from home today (thank goodness) and instructs me to finish packing up the office.

Being, as I am, and as I told him on Friday, at the point where I can't really pack anything else (And since when did moving the office become solely my problem? Bernie acts like he's doing the world a favor by announcing that he'll pack his own office--a fact that's even less-impressive when you hear that three months ago, he "cleaned" it by dumping all the stuff he didn't want in the main area.) until Buehler and Bernie decide who owns what of the piles of stuff that's left, I object to this plan. He gets pissy. I say, "fine" and wait for him to hang up. (Actually, having anticipated this, I wore jeans into the office today.)

I left my desk to go to the little girl's room. I was gone for just over two minutes. He called five times in that interval. Now I'm trying to decide whether or not to call him back now or wait a few minutes.

He's been pretty annoying already this morning, you know?

Also, I've spoken to him in the past about sitting there dialing my number over and over and over when I don't answer. I'm either on the phone or away from my desk and it does no good to sit there and work himself into a frenzy over my failure to instantly pick up the phone when he calls. I am the only person in the office most of the time. A certain percentage of my job cannot be done from my desk.

Today, if he wants me to be working in the other half of the office, packing stuff up, then I'm not going to be at my desk to pick up the phone instantly when he calls. He needs to realize this.

Also? He needs to stop calling my cell phone. My personal cell phone is not available for him to call and abuse me on. He can use the telephone he pays for, for the purpose.

(Note: For those wondering, I actually did call him back as soon as I got to my desk. His line was busy.)

Twenty minutes later, we're talking again. He has been on the phone with Qwest and has a question. What do the lights on the modem look like?

Just like yesterday, I tell him. All "green for go" and solid, except the "internet" light which is not on at all.

A minute later, he calls back. All of the phone lines are tied together where they come into the building Qwest shares with our VOIP phone provider! It's probably the VOIP system!

I remind him that we have phones. It's not the VOIP. It's the internet access.

He garbles out something about the fax machine "proving" that he's right and it's all--I don't know. Tied together or something. I have no idea how the fax machine suddenly came into it except that he believes that since we get the fax through Qwest and the phones through VOIP, it proves they're all connected.

The situation teeters on the brink of disaster as I fight back the urge to scream at him.

The memory of my near-daily complaints about my battle with the VOIP company as I tried to get them to send us a converter so our analog fax machine would work with their digital system, a six-month war, flickers through my mind. Clearly it's entirely escaped his, as has the day two months ago when I triumphed and wrested the necessary converter from their grubby little mitts, giving us the ability to send and receive faxes for the first time in months.

Forget it, I tell him. The fax, like all of our phone lines is VOIP. The internet is Qwest. They are separate. Any line-sharing arrangement that the two companies have come to is not our problem.

Call them anyhow, he says. Just ask them if they're having a problem.

I take a deep breath. I can call them, I agree. But they'll just think I'm insane. They do not provide our internet access and the services they do provide are working flawlessly.

He calls back two minutes later with a brilliant new suggestion.

Reboot!

All of the energy drains from my body, leaving me exhausted, discouraged, and disinclined to giveashit.

I've been here for two hours. So far, we've established that we have no internet access, we have phone access, and that rebooting doesn't fix the problem.

This is exactly what we knew 24 hours ago and, had either Buehler or Bernie actually listened to my answer when they asked me yesterday why we had no internet access, that's two hours of frustration I could have avoided. (Not to mention that we'd be 24 hours closer to a solution, instead of stuck re-running yesterday.)

Sigh. Going off to pack the office up now.

45 minutes later.... I came back to my desk for a drink of water and find that Bernie has called me five times. He desperately, urgently needs the answer to a question from the property managers here. Clearly he has no memory of telling me to spend the rest of the day away from my desk. Just as clearly, the idea of dialing them up himself never occurred to him.

Let us pause for a moment while I try to figure out how, "I'm not going to be a secretary or your personal assistant" turned into, "You'll never have do to a thing or think for yourself because I'm here to hold your hand and do everything that needs to be done every second of every work day."

"I know you're not my secretary," he says, "but put a stamp on this envelope for me." "I know you're not my personal assistant," he says, "but call these people and schedule a conference call and I'm available from 1-2 on Tuesday unless they're not available until 1:30 in which case we have to do it on Wednesday but if they want to do it on Thursday, tell them you'll have to call them back and then call me and check with my schedule first."

I should point out, in Bernie's favor, that he did actually get two contracts signed in the last 30 days.

In the year I've been here, these are the only bits of new business he's brought in, so this is the only time in the last year he's even remotely resembled a "salesman." Our two current largest clients have not officially renewed for 2007, and these two new contracts will replace their revenue for about two months, but whatever. (Oh. No, I tell a lie. He also got a contract signed this fall for project we delivered free "for the advertising" and a $1k contract signed last summer.

Later that same day

These entries get long when I work on them off and on for hours on end. Sorry. (Okay, no, not really. No one's making you read it.)

Bernie called back to ask what the checking account number is and to say Buehler's on the way over and he and I and Moe will be "solving" the internet access problem.

Moe, who was supposedly out of touch all day today until 4:00. Buehler, who is pretty much as clueless about technology as Bernie, although not as annoying with it. And me, the person whose every idea has already been tried without success.

I'm pretty excited about the potential there.

Later

Buehler wandered in and brought lunch. I bit into my half of the sandwich quite happily the instant before I noticed that rather than the standard "turkey lite" (acceptable on my diet) it was some new thing called a "chicken cabo" full of a mayonnaise-based sauce and bits of bacon. I ate it (very tasty), but I'm going to be on starvation rations for dinner tonight.

Buehler, contrary to Bernie's information, did not come in armed and ready to work on the internet access problem.

He asked me vaguely what we should do.

I said, "I don't know."

He looked for a Qwest bill for about 15 seconds and that was the end of it. After that, we ate lunch and now he's reading magazines.

Later

In the course of yet another phone call, Bernie casually mentioned that "if you have time, I left some boxes in my office and you can pack up that bookcase there."

I said, "Yeah. If I have time." When youknowhere freezes over was clearly implied and he clearly got it.

Anyhow. I'm home now. Five seconds after I logged on to my email here at home, I got an IM from Buehler saying the office access is fixed.