Festering Rot I

Looks like my workstation has finally crashed. After spending the entire morning figuring how to retrieve information from the corrupted HDD, I found that the data I retrieved was the data that I absolutely did not need to retrieve, i.e. system files. Worthless. Good thing nothing important was lost, so I can slack around while installing a new system. It's a bit irritating because I had just made a minor breakthrough yesterday and was looking to moving on today.

The cause of this whole mess was a blackout. Now, I haven't had a blackout at home since forever, but it's the third time since I started work that the computer lab has had a blackout. Why there isn't a backup power supply in a computer lab in a modern commercial building (for god's sake) I do not know. Usually, the computer reboots up ok, does a disk check and fixes what it needs to. This time, unfortunately, the metadata in the hard disk was corrupted.

(This is partially my fault, since I shouldn't have used the file structure for my system the way I did. Now we know better, eh?)

Called the IT support, and had one of them come down. Case in frustration. The person obviously did not know what to do, and just rebooted the computer over and over again, then fiddled with the boot order. Minutes ticked by. I was trying to stop myself from telling him to go away so I can work on the computer. Finally, I couldn't control myself anymore and suggested that I will work on it myself.

Reminds me of the other day when those two IT fellows from their headquarters (there's the main IT resources department and our departmental IT support) marched down, demanded everyone booted to Windows, and changed the admin password on the virtual windows machine. After they left, the entire lab chuckled and loaded a new windows image.

Sometimes I feel so frustrated. All these people are hired and paid to provide certain services, and I don't see any. The good ones the are hired, get saddled with all sorts of junk duties, and eventually quit. Then you have the well-meaning fellows whom you cannot really blame because they are trying their best, but they're rather clueless (like that fellow from IT). Last of all you have the purposeful slackers. And everyone is mired in bureaucracy...