My Own Private Koyaanisqatsi

Things have not started off well today.

It began at 3:00 a.m. when [[Oliver]] came into our room complaining that his feet hurt. He insisted that I turn the light on to look at them, and would take no “well, everyone’s feet hurt sometimes” explanations to get back to bed. Ultimately the issue was solved by the application of socks, which didn’t seem to make his feet stop hurting, but at least changed the subject for long enough to get him back to sleep. (Kelly reports that her daughter complained of hurting feet earlier this week too, and that other kids at her school had similar reports; perhaps there’s an childhood epidemic going on with this as a subtle symptom?).

The 3:00 a.m. wake up, combined with a late hour to bed the night before (damn you Lost) and the start of March Break meaning no pressure to get Oliver to school, left me sleeping in until 10:00 a.m.

Just before I headed off for coffee I checked my email on my iPod Touch, only to find that our mail server here at the office offline. Further investigation revealed that our server was dead in the water. And so I changed my vector to point to the office instead of [[Casa Mia]] and set out to find out what the problem was.

Into the server room, a quick reboot, and we seemed to be back in business. Then, 10 minutes later, everything went black again, and this time the server wouldn’t power back on.

It’s times like these when you wish you already had a strong coffee and a banana muffin in you. But I didn’t, and so was operating on fumes.

Thankfully, [[Computer Dynamics]], our local computer shop, and the source of the server itself four years ago, is just around the corner, and a quick phone call and they agreed to let me bring it in to see what was the matter.

So I lugged the machine over there (they are housed in the old movie theatre on Grafton Street, at the end of a rabbit warren’s worth of passageways) and dropped it off. They promised to phone my mobile when they had a diagnosis (the office phone system being offline as it too is run by the same server).

Over the [[Casa Mia]] where I was happened upon by Rob and then Sebastian and then Cynthia, thus providing me with enough entertainment and distraction to wait out the dark period.

An hour later and I called over to Computer Dynamics: dead power supply, it seems (first time for me in 25 years of PC ownership, which is not a bad batting average). Around the corner to pick it up ($65 for the power supply, $15 for the install, man am I ever happy to have these guys in my neighbourhood), lug it back to the office, and turn it on.

So at 2:00 p.m. the server came back to life, the email started to flow again, this website lit up, the phones were back in business, and all was right with the world.

I am the least spiritual person I know, and yet I am convinced that there are mischievous ripples moving through space that, if we live life Koyaanisqatsi style, conspire to fiddle with the knobs on the human operating system enough to shake us back to our senses.

Now, back to work.