A Torrid day at work...

Trials And Tribulations

OK, so today's not a good day to be me at work.

Firstly, we had an appointment with a phone engineer to be here at 08:15. He didn't arrive until 08:57 due to an accident on the motorway. No biggie, but it meant that the phone system downtime now had to take place during working hours.

On top of that, one of out terminal servers has been playing up for the last few days and today decided it was time to quit. Great.

And then the trouble started. The phone system upgrade was successful... at first - except we then lost the ability to call between offices, and also the voicemail disappeared. Oops.

At this point i de-camped to Reception, where our phone system and now-resident phone engineer are located. and I've been there ever since, trying to deal with the terminal server issue (it's still running a virus scan, but I'm pretty sure that's not the issue) and the phones, all the while fielding support calls from staff as usual.

No programming for me today then.

Office 2010 (Beta)

On the upside, I have ranted in the past (though not here) about the incredibly bad job Microsoft made of Office 2007. The number of polls etc. I have seen with titles like "If you could downgrade back to Office 2003, would you?" - the last one had a yes vote of 81% - which I think is mainly down to the new ribbon interface.

I certainly can't get used to it - I'm too ingrained with the old way of doing things. Friends and colleagues have also expressed their displeasure about custom access buttons no longer working, never being able to find the useful functions in Word etc.

And yesterday I was recommended to try the beta of Office 2010. Being able to obtain a legal copy via download (TechNet Plus) I have given it a try. Well, it certainly looks different to Office 2007, and once I've had a chance I'll give more views on this in another post.