pot o gold?
This was outside my window tonight. I stupidly broke the screen trying to get a picture of it.
In the last two days I’ve repeatedly been victimized by stupidity. The stupidity comes from all sources, including myself. Yesterday morning I had a meeting downtown. I could see that it was raining outside, yet I somehow decided that shirt and pants would be ideal attire for this climatic condition. Needless to say, the closest parking spot I could find was about three blocks from where I had to be. I ran all the way there, and got a little bit soaked. On the way back to the car, the wind was against me, and blew the rain directly at me. So, I got completely drenched and cold. To make matters worse, I remembered halfway back to the car that I had a huge umbrella in my trunk. Yeah.

My afternoon job was a router installation for a new client, which is usually extremely easy and fast. However, the company’s old IT guy had decided that it would be a good idea to install all the networking equipment in the ceiling. I put that in italics because “in the ceiling” is not a place where you’d expect to find networking equipment. In fact, if I had to guess, “in the ceiling” would be my third last guess, next to “Fiji” and “outer space.” “Wiring closet” or “server room” are more traditional locations. To make matters worse, they didn’t know any of the passwords for any of their machines. They were all infected with viruses. The network wiring was messed up. They also had no functional CD-ROM drives. Hacking passwords, climbing into the ceiling, getting the wiring redone, and creating workarounds to the virus and CD-ROM problems made the job take five hours instead of one. It’s a good thing I bill by the hour, instead of by the job.

This morning I ran into an example of my own stupidity. Against all logic, I thought I’d have time to go to the gym. I had three hours of work to do, and three hours in which to do it. Somehow I thought a 1.5 hour trip to the gym would fit. Needless to say I was late to my afternoon appointment, at which I discovered more stupidity. I was migrating the client to a new server, which usually takes about three hours. Obviously, it was not to be. The users in this office decided last week that they would like to try out Kazaa and also click on every spyware/adware opportunity within reach. After removing about 450 spyware elements from each computer on the network, I finally got started on the actual work. Computer stupidity dogged me at every step. I even managed to destroy one of the workstations by resetting it at a bad time, so I had to reinstall Windows completely on it. 😐 I was there for six hours, and the job still isn’t done. I have to go back to finish it. :S

The final dose of stupidity awaited me at home. I had plugged in my battery charger to charge my camera battery. I put it on the windowsill, near the open window. Because of torrential rains, there was a puddle of water all around and in the charger. I am afraid to put the battery in the camera now. :S

It’s 8PM right now. I think I should go to sleep. Maybe that will keep me from encountering any more stupidity today. :nod: