the search for a regular phone in the wireless world

so for labor day weekend, i decided to take the friday before off and head down to philly to hang out w/gimpy and ale and eli. it had been a long time since i had been down there and considering i had tried, and failed because of work, to visit them the two weekends previous, i was determined to go for the holiday weekend. i had worked till 1am thursday night to ensure that i did not have to go into the office the following day, and, for extra insurance, even convinced myself to take the work laptop with me to philly..

and so the adventure starts... not in philly but in a chinatown bus, somewhere around trenton. the cell rings at about 3pm. "hello?... oh hey coworkers-name whats up?... oh... ok... so you need me to log on and kick off the program? no worries, i brought my laptop, and it should take only 15 minutes out of my weekend. no biggie. have a good weekend." at this point i am only slightly irritated that i have to 'work' over the weekend. i wasnt lying about the 15 minutes, it doesnt really take more than that. 30 mins tops. it was just the idea of working on my day off...

so i get to gimpy's house and try to log on. they have wireless. my laptop has wirless. sweet. this shoudl be a synch. cant connect. wireless is picking up the internet but cant connect to the office server. wtf? ok, well they have a LAN connection to their wireless router. no problem. just plug and play... cant connect. what? dammit. at this point a few hours had gone by. restarting. retrying. restarting. retrying. fuck it. its time for dinner. i came to bbq and we're going to fuckin bbq. an hour later... ahh... food coma... NO! must figure out a way to log on. wait, gimpy's friend who works two blocks away said that i could use her office phone to dial in to work. sweet! or so i thought...

at gimpy's friend's office: plugged into the phone. no dial tone?? oh wait, i have to dial 9. that was silly... still no dial tone? wtf? gimpy suggests that it is because of the switches in the phone system. DAMMIT! all is lost! theres no hope! i give up! gimpy, being fidgety when he's stressed (somehow my stress rubbed off on him) starts to pace... all over the office. silly gimpy. whats that you say, gimpy? try the fax connection? why? oh, they may have disabled the switching function because its a fax? why the hell not? nothing else has worked... holy shit it worked! although being connected to the server through a dial up is ungodly slow... but alas, i am done! its only 10pm. it only took 7 hours to do 15 minutes of work.

the lesson here is that we're all fucked once the terrorist/aliens/lavamen destroy our high end communications because NO ONE has a regular phone anymore.

oh and work can really suck some times.