Wireless

Okay, I made absolutely sure I was on time this morning. Big meetings. Important people who have finished many years of college talking about important things. And they can't talk about these important things if they aren't all connected to the internet.

So people can't connect to the wireless internet. Not good. Cue derision and my pleas of "but it was working Friday!" That ish don' work. Well, Anton, you're an IT guy, and the IT guy who actually set up all of our infrastructure is on a phone call, so just make it work.

Let me tell you the first rule of wifi troubleshooting. It is this: give your techie a WiFi-enabled laptop. Yes, I know it is another cost that sees no immediate benefit, but you're losing points with your clients every time I need to kick them off their laptop so I can try to ping the wireless router. And if I can't ping the wireless router, then I need to walk all the way to the other end of the office, into the server room to see if I can "see" the wireless router on the server. I don't even want to take home the laptop, just let me use one while I troubleshoot the wireless problem.

So while I fiddle with resetting the router, running back to the server room, fiddling with settings, then barging into a conference room to see if it works, my laptop-carrying counterpart can simply rip the ethernet cord from the router, plug it into his computer, and test to see if the connection works! Guess what, I totally would have done that too if I had a laptop!

Second, if you're going to have a wireless network in your office, make sure it is documented. Maybe a book that has passwords, IP addresses, MAC addresses, # of total routers and where they are located, etc. Yeah, that'd be really slick. So today we have wireless people in the front, and wireless people in the back. This is where I think our two wireless routers are located. The router in the front is giving all sorts of problems (which I finally troubleshoot to the hardware-failure level - nothing can save it), and I'm thinking "well, I can't swap them out - then people in the back lose connectivity". WRONG, FOOL. There is actually an additional extra super-secret hidden router in the back to boost signal strength. So guess who discovers super-secret router, brings it up front, and saves the day? Yeah, the person with this tidbit of knowledge in his head, and it's not me. I just look like a bumbling idiot for not being able to fix the problem in 5 minutes.

But if it makes me feel any better (and it does), I solved a much more pressing problem today in a matter of seconds that others were working on for hours, so it all really works out in the end, doesn't it? Maybe I'm just cranky because I didn't get to drink coffee and read slashdot until 11:15 today!