I should have known that taking Saturday night off to rest from my bachelors party would come back to bite me, and boy did it. I come in Sunday and things seem pretty quiet, the phones aren't going crazy, there aren't tons of tickets in my bucket to worry about and the second shift person who's very lazy, and very incompetent still isn't talking to me and no angry emails from the bossman.

But around midnight a person calls in saying that she has a portable phone and that the battery in it died on her while she was taking the elevator from 7th floor to the pharmacy on 1st. She also complained that her previous ticket was closed without the problem getting fixed. I check and her previous ticket wasn't closed it was routed to bossman asking if he wanted to bill the department for a new battery. The bossman says back to the other tech that no the Cisco 7921G's are out of lifecycle in the hospital and to replace it with a 7925G.

Great, I've never been shown how to setup a wireless phone on our network but we use them at the helpdesk so I grab the phone and after a few minutes figured out **# unlocks the settings so you can change them. I also found a doc hidden on our network share that shows me what settings to use to get it on the specific wireless network for our portable wireless phones. I get it on the network then I had to build a new profile for the phone in Unity which amounted to mirroring the settings of the 7921 except for the MAC address, then associating the new phone to the correct extension. I get all that done by 2am and drop it off and pick up the old phone and with a few seconds of googling I found that on the 7921 you can go into settings, then into phone settings and hit **2 and it will give you the option to factory reset the phone. I let the phone do the reset, disassociate it with the extension, but I also picked up a second ticket for a workstation in the security office that was having trouble with slow network shares.

Now security just moved to a new office on 1st and has been complaining of slow network performance but we've not been able to replicate it. I decide instead of trying to figure out what they're complaining about I'd just replace the machine but what I didn't know was the security guards use a software called "Report Exec" that was previously on all their machines but because of some shinanigans that we weren't made aware of, they had 1 license that they shared on all machines. Once we were told of this and the fact that the license they were all sharing stopped working we forced them to buy 1 updated license and put it on one machine since they didn't want to cough up the cash for multiple licenses. And this wouldn't be a TFTS story without that one valid license being installed on the machine that they happened to submit the ticket for about slow network drive performance. Because I've seen many people bitten by the "But this file was on my old computer" song and dance I decided to hold the old machine for 2 weeks.

So I dig around our network because Altiris didn't have a job for ReportExec and I found the installer file and get it installed. But the software validates the license based on the location of server.exe apparently and didn't like the version of the file that was in the same folder as the installer file, but I was able to find another version of those files on the security team's Q drive. The software didn't like that either. I checked the old machine and found the ReportExec folder as well as a ReportExec_old. So I grab the ReportExec folder, copy it to the replacement machine and mirror permissions as they configured it so the "Everyone" group would have modify access. Not how I would do it, but I'm just the guy who's got a comet by the tail and trying to steer this disaster away from any populated areas.

Finally ReportExec is working and I relieve the telecom operator for her lunch break. After I'm done I start rounding and 2 different floors have scanners for WoWs but of course despite our numerous discussions asking them to NOT take the hand scanners off the WoWs if they're broken that's exactly what both of them did. So I had to hunt for WoWs on 2 floors to look for the one machine that doesn't have a hand scanner. Now I know what you're thinking

If they took it off the machine then why not give them the replacement scanner and let them figure out where the machine is on their own

The problem is that we associate devices together in our asset tracking database so if you have a desk phone, a docking station, a laptop, 2 monitors and an RFID reader all of those things are associated to the laptop so we know where they were deployed. The same goes for scanners, we have to associate the hand scanners to the WoW for tracking reasons so unfortunately I can't.

We finally find the WoWs, I get the information I need except now it's 5:30 so I have to swap out a backup tape in the data center and relieve the telecom operator for a bathroom break. I get that done, then I get back to my desk just in time for someone in X-Ray to say that a monitor just has "Pixelated boxes" showing. FFS. So I run down there and the machine is powered on but there is, in fact, just a 3 inch by 3 inch box in the upper left corner of the display. I turn off the workstation and power it back up and pull the power to the display and power it back up except now it's not powering on at all. FSCK! So I slide it to the station next to it and test the monitor on the power cord for it's display to make sure it's not just a bad power cable....it's not. The monitor is actually toast so I run upstairs and grab another monitor, update the info into our asset tracking database, install the new display which after I explained to the person that called me that the display died, she said

That's so strange, it was working just fine yesterday

Yea, lady. That's exactly how the universe works, if it worked fine yesterday there is no chance of it failing today. You keep believing that

I get the asset information updated for the hand scanners, get them deployed and have my coworker test the 2 scanners that were reported bad. I typically just swap the scanners out most times when a nurse reports it has gone bad simply because it's faster than trying to explain to a nurse that nothing is wrong with her current scanner, then I just test the old one and if it's good I throw it in the stockroom to be used again.

The 2 scanners are tested and one is good and one is very broken. I update their info in the asset tracking database then the rest of the day is pretty quiet.

Monday night I come in and I have an email from one of my coworkers who said that they're wanting to deploy a surface pro 3 but they wanted to get Windows 7 on it. And bossman's boss asked my coworker to ask me to get it done. FSCK. So the surface pro 3 has a docking station with an ethernet port thankfully but when I try to PXE boot by holding the volume down button and pressing the power button it rejects the PXE boot. I disable a few things in BIOS like TPM and Secure ROM and I get it to boot into the choices menu but now it doesn't boot from the Win732bit choice available. I tried the Win764bit option and it boots but once the GUI loads it doesn't have the NIC driver so it fails.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that I've never been trained on Altiris other than how to drop jobs and find workstations. But I have RDP access to the Altiris server AND I have the Altiris service username and password so I open the PXE Configuration Utility and decide to build a custom Surface Pro 3 boot option with the drivers required. Some googling and it's done but now under the Boot Menu tab the "In use by DS" option is blank for that option and when I boot the surface via PXE it doesn't show up. I read something else that says I have to save the changes so I go to the File menu and click Save. That was over 4 hours and it's still in "Updating status" and when anything tries to PXE boot it errors out with "No boot file received" message.

I told my S.O. what's been going on and she said OMG you're going to get fired and all I could think of was this