Cold Enough for You, Mr Mitty?

Boy, is it cold!

How cold is it?

It's so cold that all the lawyers and Members of Congress have their hands in their own pockets. It's colder than a mortgage banker's heart. It's colder than a well-digger's ankles. It's colder than ... well ... you get the idea.

At least we don't have any snow yet here in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac. But if we did, the wind would probably blow it away.

Like I said, it's cold.

It's also the anniversary of the birth of American humorist and master of clever wordplay James Thurber. Thurber is perhaps best known for his classic short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, about an utterly average, henpecked man whose humdrum life is constantly interrupted by escapist fantasies in which the everyday things going on around him morph into heroic adventures. Thurber also drew many cartoons for The New Yorker and other magazines and newspapers, including this classic ...

"All right, have it your way - you heard a seal bark!"

Another author worth noting today is Franz Kafka, the Czech-born author whose name lives on in the adjective Kafkaesque, referring to situations in which ordinary people are trapped in nightmarishly complex situations.

I enjoyed a day of Kafkaesque unreality yesterday as I continued my Quixotic quest (vainly, by the end of the day) to find out who was actually responsible for fixing a network outage at work. I use five different networks at the office, each for a different purpose, and the one I use most often has been inoperative (I believe down is the technical term) since late last Thursday afternoon. I called the problem in to the appropriate help desk the following morning (after realizing that my hope that the problem might resolve itself overnight was a Walter Mitty-quality fantasy). By Friday afternoon, that help desk admitted they couldn't solve the problem, and referred it to another help desk. By mid-morning on Monday the new help desk had assigned a "trouble ticket number." By yesterday morning, the network was still down and no one had yet contacted me for details of the problem. By about 2:00 PM yesterday, I had been referred to two more numbers for help (one of which got me a recording telling me it wasn't in service). The final call I made was to yet another office which referred me to ... the help desk I'd started with on Friday.

Franz Kafka couldn't have written a better story, and the network is still down.

I think I hear seals barking.

So ...

Walter "Bilbo" Mitty heads back to work today, ready to leap into either a Tron-style fantasy of defeating evil cyber monsters or a Kafkaesque bureaucratic reality of being shunted from pillar to post in search of digital justice.

Sigh.

Have a good day. May your networks always be up.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo