Gollum thought; telephony headaches

I've spent part of the evening watching more of the documentaries on The Two Towers. There's some really great stuff here; I'm watching the one about Gollum now. It's an amazing piece of work, and a great paen to the power an actor has in terms of influencing a production and defining a character. The casting of, and the performance of, Andy Serkis pretty much caused Gollum to have to be redesigned from the bottom up...and improved Gollum dramatically over what he would have been if he'd just been a CGI character with an uninvolved actor doing a voice. Much is made of the director as the "auteur" of a picture...but things like this remind you that he's really more of an editor, and the actors and scriptwriters are the "authors" of the piece.

Today had its share of demon calls, and perhaps the worst of them was an account screwed up in a way that makes me wonder how it ever came into being in the first place. You see, when we move someone's phone numbers over to our phone company, we can only move phone numbers that are at the same physical location to one account...if a guy (or a business) owns phones in more than one building, even more than one suite within the same building, they have to be on separate accounts. Well, this one account somehow manages to have on it four numbers, two of which are from one location, and two of which are from another location in an entirely different city. There's no way in heck this account should even have been created in the first place...and now that it is, there's no way we can do any maintenance on or adjustment of half of the numbers on the account...because the address associated with those phone numbers in our computer has to match perfectly to their address in the ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, or "the local Bell company")'s computer system or the order rejects. And the ILEC has the correct address for those two numbers...whereas in our account, they're associated with the address of the other two numbers in the account, because we can only have one address per account. So when we try to do anything with those numbers, we send them down as belonging to Our Address...and since the ILEC knows they belong to Their Address, boom, reject.

The whole thing has me, my co-workers, and my supervisor all shaking our heads, because we can't figure out how the order even got to be like this in the first place—the order to move those numbers over to us should have rejected in just the same way as any maintenance orders to them will now. It's the telephonic equivalent of a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And the damnedest part is that, according to my supervisor, the only way that it can be fixed...is for the guy to move his phone numbers back to the ILEC, then back to us. Our system does not offer us any way to split an account in the way that would have to be done to correct this problem...so essentially, it's a needle with a one-way eye. I'm not looking forward to having to call the guy back tomorrow to explain this.

Gift postscript

Went ahead and ordered the last few "expensive" gifts I'm getting people..."expensive" being defined as "$10 or more". Perhaps I'm spending a little more than I should...but that's what Christmas is for. I'll keep undertime down and make it up in the next few months. I haven't had to touch my savings anymore this month, so I should still be able to make my car insurance payment when it comes due next month or so. (Actually, it's really due "by March 9th" so I even have a bit of leeway there, too.) I'm expecting my tax return to help me dramatically, as well; perhaps it will even manage to halve my credit card debt.

Now all I have left to get is something nice for my grandmother (probably a cow T-shirt of some kind; she's a black-and-white-cow fan) and something for the 1-year-old, and I'm done. It's so nice doing my shopping on-line...no crowds, and I can always find exactly what I want. Also, I found another 15%-off code for Poker Industries at DVD Pricesearch: DVDPS121531, good until 12/15. I'm guessing they put codes there every half month or so...anyway, it's a good deal.

At the moment, I'd best head for breakfast and work. See you later.

Snow Wonder

So I happened to glance at artmomz's latest entry today, where she spotted a traffic accident via a local webcam. There was a lot of snow on the ground in the picture, but for some reason it just didn't register that the webcam was from right here in Springfield...I don't know exactly where she lives, after all, and I sort of thought, "Maybe it's in one of the nearby towns like Ozark..." Of course, even if it was a nearby town, and not here in Springfield, that would still mean we were likely to have gotten the snow, too.

Anyway, for some reason it never crossed my mind at all that it might have snowed here until literally the moment that I opened my door to go to work. I got a bit of a shock, for sure, as yesterday had been nice and sunny, but here was my car buried under several inches of this white stuff!

Anyway, after taking the time to dig it out, I had to revise my breakfast plans downward, and headed directly to work. Good thing I got the early start, with the condition of the roads and all. Brrrr.

Work's almost starting, so I better get going. More later on.

Home again...

What a day. Had a few annoying calls, including one that put me half an hour past time to go home...and I found I'm getting vacationed against my will, more or less. They reduce the workstaff dramatically in the holiday season, and there weren't enough volunteers to take it off, so they had to choose some people to take involuntary paid vacation for the days around Christmas. And so, I essentially get the whole week off, with pay. It's not so bad, really...some of the vacation time wouldn't have rolled over anyway, and they had to bias it toward people who had it to spare so that those who'd used it all would still be able to work for pay on those days. The only thing that worries me is that maybe the parents are going to want me to come down and spend most of it there. :)

The new supervisor, an older lady who has been largely absent the last few weeks as she's been getting chemo treatments (and consequently now goes around work with a shaven head and everpresent baseball cap), has been back the last couple of days, and she's busy putting the bay to rights, putting us all in our place and reading us mild riot acts with reference to punching in and out as close to on-time as possible. The supe is the very archetype of "tough but fair," to the point where she reminds me of some of my old middle and high school teachers. It's a little hard to get used to, but all things considered, she's a decent person and she really does care about our performance as a bay. Another thing we had to do is bundle up all of the stuff on our desks and take it home, as it's almost time for the end-of-year cleanup...so now I have three grocery sacks full of books and other stuff sitting in the back of my car.

Now that I'm finally home, I've succumbed to mild hedonism and ordered an unlimited-toppings pizza from Domino's with a coupon I had available. It should be here any minute now. I even experimentally ordered anchovies on half of it, as I can't remember ever having them on a pizza before. I'm going to try to relax the rest of the evening, before work tomorrow.