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Sara Cammeresi

Her Majesty sort of gets it right —

I'm pleased that Her Majesty plans to knight Bill Gates, but she's doing so for partly the wrong reasons, namely, his charity work.

posted by Sid at 08.09 / 631     [ Comments: 0 ]

Apartment internetworking —

My apartment building has a wireless network, to which one can connect for a fee. I do not use this network because I have access via SDSL, and a good thing, too, as the building network is having some problems.

posted by Sid at 17.30 / 021     [ Comments: 0 ]

The one-hour outage —

According to logs, at 13.06 this afternoon, my SDSL went down. I became aware of this at approximately 13.11. After doing some remote diagnosis, I was shortly contacted by Sir Tim of Beckman who verified my awareness of the problem.

I rang McLeod, they ran their tests, and they said they saw an open circuit at 6,760 feet. They opened a ticket. I then proceeded to think, hmm, that's about the length of my loop; the problem could be an inside wiring problem, or who knows, I've got my router on backed up power, but maybe the power has been out for two hours. I decided to go home to verify that my apartment building had not burnt down and to verify the integrity of the inside wiring due to the fact that I purchased some telephone tools during my last outage.

Pulling into the car park beneath my apartment, I observed a vehicle parked beside the telephone demarc. I parked The Royal Automobile, got out, removed my earmuffs, and strode over to the workmen standing at the demarc.

Me. What are you doing to the demarc, and why is my DSL down?
Them. Uhh, we're from Soltec; we're fixing the Internet service because some equipment was stolen. Where's your DSL?
Me. It's...umm...oh, I don't remember. Just wait. I will find it.

Now these guys appeared to be competent telephone technicians, but as far as they were concerned, I was a normal user, and as all technical people know, users are stupid, so they probably thought (quite rightly) that I was stupid. Thus, I needed to demonstrate that I meant business, that they were not dealing with a user, but that they were, in fact, talking to the real deal, His Majesty The Emperor Sidney August Cammeresi, IV. I went up to my apartment, connected a tone generator to the DSL pair, and came back down with a detector. I located the pair coming from my apartment (they then appeared to understand that I meant business), but I then became confused. Due to Ameritech cancelling my loop in October, two binding posts were marked as mine, the old one and the new one, but I couldn't remember which was the correct one, and I didn't trust the circuit ID marked on the schedule inside the demarc.

Meanwhile, a Hot Chick approached. She enquired as to the state of the building Internet service and when it would again be functional, and she had a short conversation with the Soltec engineers.

After she departed, I enquired as to what equipment had exactly been stolen. Apparently, the villains made off with three routers, a wireless bridge, and so on. The worst part is that Soltec took out their monitoring system just recently to work on it, so Soltec don't know exactly when the crime occurred. (Ugh.)

Them. Yeah, hey, didn't you post about it?
Me. Huh?
Them. Didn't you post a picture of our sign in your blog?
Me. Why, yes, I did. How did you find that?
Them. Oh, I know this girl named [a mutual acquaintance], and she saw it, and she told me, `Dude, check this out,' so I checked it out, and I was like, `Dude, this guy's fast!' and then I saw you walk up to us, and I recognised you from the picture on your web page, and I was like, `Oh no, why is [Your Majesty] here?'

This was very amusing, and now these hits in my web logs suddenly made sense:

holy.soltec.net - - [27/Jan/2004:16:25:00 -0600] "GET /sac/blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 20514 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Sidney+Cammeresi&btnG=Google+Search" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/103u (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/100"

holy.soltec.net - - [28/Jan/2004:09:51:15 -0600] "GET /sac/blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 20514 "http://www.cheesecake.org/sac/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007"

Now they realised the true gravity of the situation.

THEY FOULED UP THE BLOG GUY'S DSL.

At length, I rang McLeod, got the correct binding post, which we verified with a linesman's handset, and we found that my jack was connected to the wrong binding post. We fixed it, my link came back up, and all was right with the world, so apparently they had accidentally disconnected it and reconnected it to the wrong place.

And because I'm such a nice guy, I told the Soltec engineers that I wouldn't even mention their names in my blog, a promise which I have to keep since they know where my blog is! And then I came back to work and embarassingly closed the ticket. The world is now karmically balanced on the heels of my post about how glad I am that I don't use the network whose equipment had been stolen, but I think I got shaftified.

posted by Sid at 15.03 / 918 in Humourous Stories     [ Comments: 2 ]