Gawd bless our network...

...and all who sail in her.

Bloody typical, isn't it? My minion doesn't work Fridays, and my boss is taking a long weekend to visit the ancestors up north. This, dear reader, should be office heaven - the odd task to while away the day between prolonged bouts of tetris and web-surfing.

But no.

Instead our network has had other plans, for whilst I am now on-line, the entire operation is s l o w b e y o n d b e l i e f.

As a rule, if there's something wrong with the network, it tells you so and your PC boots up in standalone mode. A little later, we then get a message over the PA to tell us that we can log in properly.

Not so today, oh no.

Today the server is just fast enough to kid the PC that something is happening. It took a record half hour, two sandwiches and a mug of coffee to log in today. Twenty minutes of that were needed to get up as far as loading the wall paper (but not the icons - they took longer).

And while I'm typing this, I've just received an email asking for corrections to a 200 pages of draft consultation document with everything done but an autograph from the author.

So much for the best laid plans of mice and men...

Gawd bless our network...

...and all who sail in her.

Bloody typical, isn't it? My minion doesn't work Fridays, and my boss is taking a long weekend to visit the ancestors up north. This, dear reader, should be office heaven - the odd task to while away the day between prolonged bouts of tetris and web-surfing.

But no.

Instead our network has had other plans, for whilst I am now on-line, the entire operation is s l o w b e y o n d b e l i e f.

As a rule, if there's something wrong with the network, it tells you so and your PC boots up in standalone mode. A little later, we then get a message over the PA to tell us that we can log in properly.

Not so today, oh no.

Today the server is just fast enough to kid the PC that something is happening. It took a record half hour, two sandwiches and a mug of coffee to log in today. Twenty minutes of that were needed to get up as far as loading the wall paper (but not the icons - they took longer).

And while I'm typing this, I've just received an email asking for corrections to a 200 pages of draft consultation document with everything done but an autograph from the author.

So much for the best laid plans of mice and men...