I had a Homer Simpson moment today – I actually screwed up on the most commonly used application at my workplace, NETMEETING! Its really unbelievable how I actually managed to do it though! Ok here’s the thing, I’ve been having serious network problems at my workplace for the past few days. I called up IT last week and they changed some stupid settings on Internet Explorer and it seemed to work fine for two minutes until the support staff put down the phone. I just couldn’t believe my arse luck and I thought its probably going to get better soon. But then the next day I was on leave and tried to login from home. Everything was fine – I mean even though I was logged in via VPN things were smooth. So my assumption was the network was fine at work too.

But then I had the same issue yesterday when I got back to work. I kind of ignored it and continued the day and when the network started to crawl at a snail’s pace today I lost it! I called up IT and was hoping for the dude at the other end of the phone to give me a bunch of settings to change and hopefully everything was going to be fine. But unfortunatly he just said that this was not his problem and he was going to refer it to the smart asses at the network group. Ok, this was getting a bit annoying but I just had to get through with it as diplomatically as possible. He gave me a “ticket number” and told me that someone will be contacting me soon.

Soon enough, another dude called me at my desk. For some reason he was really cheerful that my network was slow – that was REALLY ANNOYING! He started asking me the normal questions like “How long has it been slow?”, “When was the last time you tried?” etc etc and all this with a chuckle. Doesn’t he understand the seriousness of the situation? He even made a comment like “Probably some underwater cable was damaged…” to which I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Dude, the network is fine at home! Does the office have a dedicated cable running underwater to Alaska? Anyways, he was then kind enough to finally ask me for my IP address and start netmeeting.

I started netmeeting, shared my desktop and allowed control. He checked on the settings, and decided to type in the name of the proxy server – with a HUGE typo! I mean he couldn’t spell proxy! He said “I think that should work, give me a call if it doesn’t. Check again tomorrow”. Ok I’ve had enough of his incompetency but I decided to try it out myself (after I’d like to think I’m techie too!). Just then my friend pinged me on yahoo messenger. I typed to him like “Sorry for the delay in replying… A dumb #$@@#$ was fixing my network”. Guess what, I didn’t log off Netmeeting! I thought I was screwed. As soon as I realized that I was actually sharing my desktop with the dumb #$@@#$ I felt I was him already! Fearing the worst I rang up my best friend to share the “news” with him. Frankly I wasnt worried about the dude but more for the strict adherence to protocol at my workplace. But in a few minutes I received an email from him asking whether my network was ok… blah blah! Maybe he didn’t notice? Well that’s all I can wish for. But seriously I can’t believe how I could screw up on a Netmeeting session! This is something I won’t forget in a while!

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