That’s Mr. Cranky Pants to you!

Yesterday was a bad day of epic proportions, at least for me.  It’s not like I lost a limb or a loved one or my home was destroyed by a hurricane or I had to talk to the current president.  It was just a bad day at work followed by an even worse night at home.

I’m teaching an online class this week.  For those of you not in the know, that means that I teach via a speakerphone and use Webex to demonstrate the topics to students around the world, they also use Webex to complete the class exercises just as if they were in the classroom itself.  Generally I really enjoy teaching in this format because I don’t have to dress up and I can take my shoes off and most importantly I can make faces at the stupid students and they don’t know the difference.  The real problem is that my boss is a cheap bastard and has decided that instead of sending the students a hardcopy of the manual we are going to send them a pdf file and *hope* that they print it out.  The problem is that my manual is 600 pages double sided and no one wants to print it out.  This makes it very difficult to for them to complete the exercises when their screen is taken over by Webex and they can’t toggle back and forth to the written lab they need to be following.  Instead of being able to work independently and learn the concepts the students spend most of th exercises asking me to repeat steps that they’ve forgotten since the demonstration only moments before.  I know the manual is what makes the difference because when the students have the manual in hard copy in front of them the exercises go off without a hitch.  *Le Sigh* I’ve tried explaining this to my boss, but all he can see is the bottom line and apparently spending 20 bucks per student when each one of them pays a grand to attend the class is just too much money.

I went straight from the office to the gym and actually worked out for the first time in a week, so by the time I left my body was aching.  Since it had been awhile since I was in the gym I weighed myself, big mistake I had gained 2 pounds which never makes me happy.  Then I got to head to the grocery store to try and figure out what we were having for dinner for the next few nights.  I usually plan that out ahead of time, but this week I fell down on the job so was trying to come up with healthy yet delicious options as I cruised the aisles of my local Fred Meyer.  Not an easy task, but I didn’t do too bad of a job considering.  Leaving the grocery store I assumed that my bad day was almost at an end and I was looking forward to sitting down at home after dinner and watching the Hell’s Kitchen finale and maybe some Alton Brown and we still needed to watch the Kathy Griffin show from last week.

Of course all my desires were thwarted when I sat down and turned on the tv.  The damn satellite receiver wasn’t working.  So I did what I usually do in this circumstance, I rebooted it (the dvr is remarkably similar to Windows in this respect) and expected that it would once again work and beam mindless entertainment into my living room.  No such luck.  The damn thing still didn’t work and I was forced to call Dish Network to try and resolve the issue.  After 45 minutes on the phone with them it came down to us needing a new satellite box.  This meant of course that there would be no tv for the 3-5  business days it took to get the new box to us and we had lost all the programs we had recorded on the dvr.  Not only were those two issues frustrating, but we had only had this particular dvr for 6 weeks – yes this was a replacement of a replacement and here we were again with their shitty equipment disrupting our mindless pleasures.  We’ve been with Dish Network for over 8 years, but that mostly bucolic, sometimes rocky relationship came to a screaming end last night when I cancelled our service.  I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but we’re going back to cable today.  On the upside that means we’ll be getting HD channels which will be mega cool and we’ll once again be getting the NW Cable News channel which I’ve missed having since it’s not available on satellite and we’ll have access to Logo which may be cool as well.

I was hoping that today would be better, but so far it’s not looking good.  I woke up with a massive migraine, the kind that usually requires me to head back to bed to get rid of, but since I’m teaching I don’t have that option today.  So I threw back some Excedrin Migraine and headed in to the office.  I started my class to find that none of the students had printed the sections they would need for today (thanks for being a cheap bastard boss) so the very technical and intricate labs will be made even more difficult than they need to be.  Then I started getting bombarded by emails from my most annoying coworker about how the virtual machine I gave him didn’t work.  On a class break I ran upstairs to see what the problem was, turns out he neglected to start up the domain controller virtual machine that I also gave him.  Kind of hard to log onto the domain when the dc isn’t running.  *Le Sigh*

At least I have one thing to look forward to tonight and that’s the Jestertunes radio show.  Come one come all and join the hilarity that Jester hosts on a weekly (okay almost daily) basis.  (7pm PDT)