walked into the office this morning and almost got freaked out for the morning. i tried to login to my workstation as usual, to the rude shock of an error message that read my account had expired. ran over to my supervisor, who said she already filed the application to extend my account. she rang helpdesk and they said they would do something. so in the meantime, i got a colleague to lend me her account so that i could continue working.

then it dawned on me: i had left the files on my desktop, and a user may not access another user's Documents and Settings folder. bummer. then out of curiousity, i went to check the properties of my Documents and Settings folder. it read 0 files 0 bytes. my heart almost dropped. retrieved the last backup i did, and it was almost a thousand records ago. was in some kind of stunned and infuriated state. but no knife and no idea which dumbass's fault it was over at IT side. it would take me (and a constant supply of nitrous boosting) days to recover that data. and i'm supposed to complete the project by this friday!

exxon is a seriously nice company with a seriously screwed IT dept. last week, they did a network-wide deployment of their latest authentication module, which gave employees the flexibility of a passwordless login to workstations and email. all one needed to do was insert his shiny new employee smartcard into the reader. unfortunately, that module was bugged. it corrupted systems network-wide and almost every employee had to restart their workstations about twenty times to get a cleaned up copy of the module installed. i restarted mine close to 40 times i think.

anyway, after a few hours and still in shock, my supervisor told me they had reinstated my account. so i quickly logged in and checked my files. i tell you.. that sense of relief is indescribable. and the rest of the day went on uneventfully, not that i'm complaining. no news is always good news.

photo of the day: a macro of water droplets on the cafeteria tray during lunch. yes, i was *that* bored. but quite intrigued by how the non-stick material of the tray made the droplets round

and i also found out why the IT side was so inefficient: they spend more time implementing software like this that records statistics that in my honest opinion, collects pretty useless data for your own personal viewing pleasure.

someone tell me how, by knowing that i hit 10,605 keystrokes today, will my working efficiency go up any higher?