I get into work Tuesday morning, do some routine maintenance on our Internet gateway, and BAM, the damn thing gets hosed. Email - down, FTP - down, Internet surfing - works, but flakey. In addition, I can't get to any of the Administration screens that I would normally use to diagnose and fix such problems.

I call the dreaded tech support. On hold for 1/2 hour, only to find that we don't have a service contract. They transfer me to sales, where I take care of that, and I am told I need to call service back to get back in the queue. grrrrrr!

Call service back and wait on hold for 1 hour and 55 minutes! I kid you not. I finally get some dope who won't try to fix my problem, but just wants to send me a whole new box. That means we will be down for 1 1/2 days.

Next morning box comes in, busy configuring it, somethin' stinks like hell. Of all things, in the middle of this crisis our god-damn toilet is overflowing. Turns out the sump pump that pumps sewage for about three buildings in this hell hole busted, and shit water is spewing out all over our production floor. Its stinks like shit throughout the building, and I am trying to get our Internet up and running so our company can function.

I'm not done yet. I finally configure this Internet gateway, my LAN and WAN connections look fine, diagnostics pass the test, so I try to restore from a backup to save re-entering all the user settings and special services (yeah! I acutally back the thing up every week). Only, the restore does not work. I try it three times to no avail. Finally, I hack into the backup file, and find its all screwed up. Guess things have been screwed up for a while, cause I have to go back to a backup of 3 weeks ago in order to find a good one. Still, that is alot better than having no backup at all.

What a lousy couple of days I've had... and I am in a depressed mood to begin with.