School Daze

School started Wednesday for the boy and he is loving it. Finally, after a school year of driving to and from school every day the bus picks him up and drops him off in front of the house. He can sit on the bus with his friends and return to his own home after school. Mom and Dad can say good-bye from the comfort of my doorway and already his buddies are ringing the bell early so they can 'hang' before the bus comes.

Stressful week for me at work. First real stress filled days in a LONG time. Not to bore you with technical details so the short and quick is: My switcher needs to be RESTARTED at least once a year (maybe twice), this one hasn't been done since they bought it 8 years ago. RESTARTS erase everything and we have about 60 different effects we use a day that took us over 2 weeks to build. Before RESTART you save everything to the disk. And there is the rub, the disk drive was not working. So we went through a month of testing drives, changing panels and finally a motherboard and nothing worked. So we crossed the fingers and hoped the RESTART would jump start the drive (we knew we had bad RAM and the manufacturer said reboot it and it will work). Well we pull the power and restart the whole shebang and it is TOTALLY DEAD. Nothing stops the heart when the Chief Engineer just looks at the board and says "Oh we are fucked" 2 hours before Air Time.

Needless to say the next hour or so are a blur until I asked if the drive was getting power. Well the engineer looked at me shrugged and got some monitors and star trek looking shit, hooked them up and said "Mmmmmm?". Then proceeded to change a fuse and all was well!!!!! So 4 weeks of the board not working correctly, 4 major On Air screw-ups due to the board, 2 new floppy drives, one new mother board and all that was broken was a fuse..............

All is now well but my nerves were totally shot..............