2009 - July 6 (Singapore)


Middle of night (actually 2AM Monday morning) I get a call from Houston and an email on my Blackberry. Seems I am not answering my phone (they called the office) and they will close my ticket since I am not responding. The SOBs paid no attention to the fact that I stated in my email I was in Singapore and of course I was not answering my office phone. Furthermore, how in Hell would me answering my phone at the office lead to a solution to problems I was encountering when I was not at home. Sometimes I wonder exactly what reading skills the technicians have that work at our help desk. So I call them back (remember it is 2AM where I am at). We discuss the problem and they decide to reset my password. Okay, sounds like a plan. They do so, something seems to work, they tell me to leave it logged in for several hours to make sure that the password is transmitted around to all the controllers on our corporate network. Hey, no problem, I want to get back to bed anyway since the process took 2 hours to complete. So back to beddy bye I go for two hours sleep.

I wake up and attempt to unlock my computer session. NO GO. Bad password. I try three times and it tells me I have locked out my account. Called Houston with the associated problems. The technician tells me that they cannot reset my password when I am connected via VPN. WHAT??? How in the devil did the previous password reset work? And if that is true, why did the previous technician try to do it. The only solution is to go to the office and connect up there, where the reset process supposedly will work. So I pack up my electronic boat anchor and head in.

In the office I contact the local help desk for a password reset. No go. It seems that, in the infinite wisdom of our IT organization, only they have the correct priestly knowledge to perform password resets so they do not allow any other region to perform the task. What a load of bullshit. I have always hated the IT priesthood and this is exactly why I fight it at all times on all fronts. Our civilization will collapse in a heap of useless technology when some pimple-faced idiot forgets some master password someday and the whole world goes off-line. So we call and get the on call technician to reset my password (remember it is 13 hours behind my local time so it is around 10PM where he is). I get reset, we do some magical incantations that he assures me will fix my problems when I get home. Things may go better tonight. I thank him profusely (never piss of the gods or their representatives on Earth).

At lunch the local team takes us out to the local hawker square for lunch. We pick an open air restaurant with ducks, chicken, and BBQ pork slabs hanging around edge of counter. Had Kailan (Gai Lan, or Chinese broccoli), Lacquered Chicken and Roasted Duck. Kimberley went green and stated that crackers back at work were the best thing she could think of. I promised her a Mexican dinner in the evening. She said that she had earned it by quietly sitting at the table with us while her stomach went walk-about without her. The Mexican restaurant was a find by a visiting contractor from San Francisco, who had found it and voted it to be very good. After work we decided we needed to find wireless mice for our computers since there were no spare mice in the office. Our Singapore office IT is the tightest group of skinflints I have ever met. They make you sign a pre-charge receipt to get a network cable for your desk in case you take it with you and don’t return it. They have no spare parts for anything. And if you have to get your computer repaired under warranty, they won’t lend you a computer to use while yours is being worked on. But they are not the only group like that there. You can’t get coffee in the snack bar because the site makes each department pay for their own coffee and soft drinks. So while there is a really nice break area with one of those multi-product dispensers for coffee, tea, and chocolate, no products are in it because no single department will pay for it and no one can figure out how to distribute the costs of using it. So each department keeps a small refrigerator in their area with cold drinks, water, and instant coffee. And the only instant coffee any group buys is Nescafe (or as I call it, Nyet-caffe). That is real crap.

We head out after work to find the Funan IT Mall to get mice, and the Mexican restaurant the contractor told us about. We discover that the Funan IT Mall is probably the largest single-purpose mall ever built. It covers a half a city block and is six stories tall. And there is nothing in it but electronics and computer stuff. It is where techie geeks go to die. We find that a mouse we were looking for, called the Benq Optical Wireless Mouse, cannot be found for any amount of money. So we wind up with some Logitech mice in bright metallic colors and they are pretty good. Mine is a deep metallic blue that matches my Nano. Real romantics match their lover’s eye color, geeks match their other electronics. It is a pretty sad statement about them. After we leave the mall we grab a cab and head for the Mexican restaurant. The address we are given is this narrow pedestrian street with nothing but restaurants lining it from one end to the other. And neither end, nor anywhere in the middle, could we find the restaurant we were told about. After spending nearly an hour looking up and down the street, we give up and have a VERY unsatisfactory dinner at a place called Bobby's Grill. We do not recommend it and will not dwell on the menu at all.

We get back to the hotel and I start work. NYET AGAIN! The damn VPN network will not connect to the corporate network. I am completely postal at this point. I have twice the normally scheduled workload since I lost my assistant, I am trying to manage global surveys for employees, which is a task that I normally do not do when on travel, and I am already behind on my planned work. Irritated is the mildest state of mind I could be in right now. Bed time and no more playing with fixes.