This has to be one of the lousy days in my life. With this blog, i can remember this day, 24 July 2006 forever (So long this blog sticks around). Black Monday, ultimate Monday morning blues.
The morning
So the day started as usual in the morning at 6.20am. As i move my bicycle down to the ground floor, I got the sinking feeling that I have forgotten to take the notebook harddisk IDE converters with me. For various reason, I have to bring my own equipment to work, sadly. So when i reach the ground floor and put my bike at rest, I pulled out the contents of my 12 years old blue Deuter bag and confirmed my worst fear. I locked my bike to the nearest water pipe quickly and stormed upstairs back to my flat while I muttered a few mumblings of my poor memory.
I searched my desk and drawer, and of course, I found nothing. The same sinking feeling struck me. I sticked my hands into my bag once again and once again, I have proved that I can be an idoit at times. The four converters were placed in a small red plastic bag which is in the same shade of red of another bigger plastic bag holding my swimming stuff. During the initial search on the ground floor, I had missed the smaller plastic bag because of my sotongness.
Morning train ride
As i walked out of the train at Dhoby Ghaut interchange, a Chinese, male, in his 30s, whom i was walking behind him, conveniently swung a large heavy bag to his right. He overdid it and his bag hit me on my right shoulder. To the superstitious, to be hitted on the shoulders signify bad luck. And that was quite a knock. The guy apologised as I walked off to the up-riding escalator towards the Northeast Line. 啊！一大清早就如倒霉了. I nodded my head at the attacker as a gesture of forgiveness. Well, I am not really a supersitious person, so I fought the urge to beat him up and throw him on the MRT tracks as a incoming train approaches.
15 mins later, I arrived at Harbourfront station. As I got out of the gates, I saw something dropped to the ground. My sleepy mind sprung into action and spotted a Chinese, male, approximately 15, had dropped his POSB debit master card onto the ground as he pulled out his wallet to get pass the gates towards the train. He did not notice his lost in his haste. It took me a split second to decide to add some good luck to his life by picking up the card and returning his lost card, despite that it is a guy, not a chio bu who need my help in this case. I hope I can get some karma instead of the usual "Thanks".
Late morning
I made a cup of tea at about 10am and placed it on the shelf. A walk to the men's wind up into a trip of no return. Numerous users required my IT expertise to solve their Monday morning computer blues. After I finally made it back to my IT store room, I realise that my cup of Teh-O had became Teh-Ping-Kosong. Since my creamer and sugar would no longer attempt to dissolve in the cool brown liquid, I had to dump it into the bin as it was 12.15pm already. That's lunch.
Lunch
My sweet tooth hurted my head so much just after my lunch at the hawker centre. I walked over to Cold Storage and bought a pack of Unicurd Mango Tofu.
I went back to the pantry and excitingly, pull the beancurd out of it's plastic bag confinement. A quick tear of the plastic cover revealed a disturbingly heavy sweet aroma. It smells so good. By hey, I had been eating this dessert since it was first sold. The sweet aroma does not fit any of their products. A peek at the beancurd exposed the truth. Gas bubbles had formed. Despite the 9 August expiry, the beancurd had turned bad. And this is not the first time it had happened. It had happened once while I was still working at Cathay Organisation. But well, it's 10 minutes to end of lunch time, so I put the spoilt sweet smelling beancurd back into it's plastic bag confinement and hung my head towards the IT store room. It's too late to change for a new cube. Just in case, I double checked that my $0.85 spent will be guaranteed by locating the Cold Storage receipt.
Mid Afternoon
My colleague was teaching me how to label the backup tapes on the Overland Powerloader backup drive through Veritas backup exec. After scheduling the labeling jobs, we went about to perform our respective tasks. At about 3+, I went back to the server room to check on the status of the process.
This freaking black box actually cost a 天文数值 amount of USD$4799.99 exluding GST and shipping ! And it was last touched by my 衰hands, dying with kilometers of tapes in it.
"Hard Error"
The error message was imprinted on the tiny LCD display on the backup device. My colleague was alerted immediately. As I had suspected, he confirmed that one of the tapes seems to have been stuck.
"Eh, this one no more warranty leh", my colleague stated with his usual smiling face. He stopped all the backup services and attempted to use his 盖世武功 to resurrect the machine. We did what we can, and finally used one of the ultimate move in IT support - REBOOT. Alas, it didn't work. The backup drive had died trying to execute my labeling commands. At least we will not have any more worries about backup commands failing as they will be no more backup drive to use in the first place. Later on in the evening, after alerting my immediate superior, the server room became a scene for 武林大会. Ideas were brained stormed for covering the void of a dead backp drive. In a corporate environment, the idea of losing a day's backup is a IT manager's worst nightmare. I sneaked out of the room with my bloodied hands behind.
*Update* 31 July 2006 - The 衰ness continues, tape backup woes.
The Overland Powerloader (tape library) actually contains a internal tape drive which had a tape stuck inside now. Our Jurong Island IT expert came down and swapped it with their own internal tape drive in an attempt to resurrect the expensive black box. Alas, the replacement tape drive seems to be a dead unit, not much better than a unit with a stuck tape. Attempts to extract the stuck tape from the original drive was met with resistance by several allan screws.
Next, we used another backup drive library from IBM, a auto loader with a capacity of 7 tapes. But after 2 hours of trying very hard to make it load tapes without the assistance of a long screw driver, we gave up. My IT manager will hate me very soon.
Evening
I went to Cold Storage with my sweet smelling tofu in tow. The cashier started to lecture about the need to store such goods in the fridge and not under the hot sun. Despite my assurance that it was not the case, she went into hyper auntie mode and repeated herself again and again. At first she thought the sweet aroma was correct, it really smell sweet. How can a rotting food stuff smells good? I would have come to the same conclusion if I had not ate this tofu for years since it's release in Singapore. I went to fetch a new box after I told her that I just want to change for the same thing. Athough I told her that I do not want to eat the beancurd now, she insisted on opening the beancurd to check out the "freshness" of the tofu. Upon opening the seal of the packaging, she realise that I was right all along. There wasn't any sweet aroma from the fresh box. She went into apologic mode and asked me to fetch another box which I took home. All this more a tofu priced at $0.85.
I got to the Harbourfront station entrance and found that it was closed. Wow, that's new. Harbourfront station was closed during peak hours. Scores of SBStransit staff were directing passengers to their free shuttle bus service which covered Harbourfront to Dolby Ghaut as the stations in-between were all closed.
I hopped into one the shuttle bus, and found myself a seat. Shortly after the bus ride started, I overheard a million theories on the train service disruption. Chemical spills. Train crash. Terrorist attack. Scheduled drills. People falling onto the tracks (How is that possible??) The truth showed itself as a bulletin on TV mobile.
"NEL Harbourfront to Dhoby Ghaut station closed due to electrical problem"
Ok, that destroyed all the over-active imaginations of the passengers and calm the nerves of the supporters of the terrorist theory. At least there will be not suicide bombers on our buses yet.
Due to my incredible weakness i got when taking buses, the 30 minutes bus ride left me fatigued and sick. I got motion sickness and migraine since I was very young. In short, that translates into hell for me whenever I take a bus ride longer than 15 mins. It gave me an excuse not to go for my planned swim. My thermal pants, underwater visual aid, water absorbtion fabrics and human body cleaning agents in my bag will be destinated for use on another day.
I hope my bad luck stops it's run up to this point.
For now, I don't want to check my investment in ToTo in case my bad luck have not faded away.
*Update* 29 July 2006 - The ToTo results on Monday confirmed my bad luck is for real. My 2 sets of system 7 entries matched a grand total of ONE number. That's 14 numbers and only 1 matched !!! I need flower water !
