singing "Can't stand the rain"

Really, truly, definitely had enough of rain this summer. Just spotted mushrooms growing in my lawn as it's absolutely saturated and there has been no sign of sunshine for days. The most optimistic high temperature forecast over the next 10 day period is 18. That is not a high. That is, in fact, the overnight temperature from a few months ago. I think global warming has got itself a bit confused. In order to help with this (and to cheer myself up) I've now switched on every entertaining lightsource in my home. Current count is: lava lamp, plasma ball, pink fluffy curtain lights, purple/multicoloured/blue sets of fairy lights and my colour-changing Belkin USB hub.

Had the past few days off work while studying for a professional qualification, which is lucky as otherwise I would still be cringing under my desk in embarrassment. Following the mailstorm problem at work, I got another email checking if I still needed access to Sytem A as it was sometimes known by different names. Replied by saying despite my previous flippant reply stating I'd never heard of it, I did actually look at it and worked out it was something I had never used and would never require.

And a few days later what do I get? ANOTHER email with EVERYBODY in the distribution list placed in the TO field again, asking if I still needed access.

Me being me (I'm the woman who only opens her mouth to change feet), I email our CIO expressing my disappointment at the project as I had already answered twice, and they'd made the stupid mailing list mistake again.Luckily this time only 2 replies went to everybody on the list as most people had remembered what happened last week.

Just to put this into perspective, our CIO had had a busy week. He's been in Montreal and Moscow, and has presented Bill Gates with a retirement gift from the group of CIOs he fraternises with regularly. So I felt EXTREMELY sheepish when I found out he'd been in touch with the project manager who was then made to ring me to apologise and explain the situation, and promise it wouldn't happen again. He emailed me a few minutes after the call, having made the project manager report back after grovelling to me. I did say I felt a bit bad about moaning but he praised me for raising the issue.

Still stayed bright red and cringing for the rest of the day....

PEBKAC of the highest order

You might have heard of mailbombs and DDOS attacks such as the one recently suffered by the Telegraph , but have you ever heard of a company having their mail server fall over due to employee stupidity?

Yesterday morning in the early hours, the 'Role cleansing team' emailed every employee to check if we still needed access to certain systems- one email per system. Sensible people like myself clicked 'reply' and gave the answer. Super. Then some less clever people hit 'reply to all'. This is not normally a problem except.....the role cleansing team hadn't used the BCC field for their distribution lists. They'd used the 'To' field. So EVERYBODY got the reply. Then some people (like myself) got a little annoyed, and started (unlike myself) sending out emails going 'don't use reply to all'. Then started getting more annoyed as the deluge increased as people started logging in for 9am, and there were 30 emails in 2 minutes in each inbox. And started sending pissy emails slagging people off for being stupid -neatly missing the point that each person logging in would be starting from the top of their inbox so wouldnt be ready the pissy emails yet, so all that was doing was clogging up the system.

I was getting rather shrill by this point(longer-standing colleagues call this 'going hypersonic' and remove sharp objects from my immediate vicinity when this happens). Replied to a couple of people who thought themselves funny by replying to all saying 'Okay' to the messages saying 'don't reply to all', pointing out it may have been funny the first time but originality was what counted.

So this is 9.15, and I have 67 pointless messages.

So do the other few thousand UK employees.And the offshore employees. I'm spluttering and waving my arms about and emailing the role cleansing team and the IT service desk about blocking the mails.

Then someone from a northern office sends out a picture of a circus ringmaster with a banner saying "The best show on earth" with our company name added below.

I laugh.

Then it gets silly. More emails pour in by the second- genuine responses to the original email, threats and pleading from the frustrated/confused about a possible virus, jokes, car adverts, panicky messages from offshore team managers as their teams could no longer access Lotus Notes, pictures of the Grand Canyon, invites to the pub and on and on and Ariston.

By now the entire floor is abuzz with comments and yelps from late arrivals trying to open their inbox. No chance of doing any sensible work. I reply to an email by someone from Bangalore enquiring after the weather, a Liverpudlian complimenting her choice of Iron Maiden album cover and another person in Bishopbriggs advising him to shut down Notes and go for a coffee.

By 9.40 we were up to over 200 emails.

Servicedesk managed to stop it. Our CIO posted a sheepish apology in his intranet blog, explaining what had happened and promising that distribution lists would be placed in the correct field in future, and that email training would be rolled out to explain the difference between 'reply' and 'reply to all'.

For a company that introduced 'Pay as you drive' telematics and has a digital flood map of the UK that accurately plots risk to within a few feet, it was a pretty poor performance.

And now it's time for the first in an occasional series I'd like to call 'Song lyrics I have stuck in my brain'. Today, it's the final line from the Hungarian Eurovision entry (I love high camp, I'll blog about this in future) 'except an evanescent, unsubstantial blues'

things that make you go squeee!

Amused myself greatly on the bus this morning by freaking out a teenage boy. He was listening to Papa Roach on his mp3 player a little too loudly. So I sang along until he got the message and turned it down :)

On arriving at work, nipped to the Ladies to attempt to tame the curly mess that is my hair this morning. Zebedee came in and said it was looking good and I should keep up with growing it longer. Bless her little cotton socks! Hadn't been getting much in the way of positive feedback on what is a major life change for me (apart from the occasional comment of 'wow, your hair's grown a lot'-never followed up by saying anything good about it).

capitalism

The unveiling of the London 2012 Olympics has not gone down well. It had made me feel quite nauseous, but has had a worse effect on people with photo-sensitive epilepsy.

Must head to the capital soon- haven't seen TheRealLJ since my hair was 6 inches shorter. Also have Jamie T's song Sheila stuck in my head, which is annoying- he sounds like the kind of chav I'd take pains to avoid on a late bus home. The new video featuring Bob Hoskins is wonderfully creative, however, for which I forgive him many things. It's almost as incongruous a pairing as Christopher Walken in the Fatboy Slim video for Weapon of Choice.

While messing about on Youtube, I found Hemel op die Platteland by Fokofpolisiekar. LOVE the song since I nabbed the free mp3 earlier this year but think I may volunteer myself to act as stylist for the band. Long hair and stripy jumpers? It's been done

homesick

Just been watching an episode of Cooked, a show about a guy cooking his way around 4500km of South Africa with a group of friends. It's being shown on one of the less appealing of the 600+ channels that are fed into my home-you know, one of the ones that chooses a random assortment of shows and repeats them every 4 hours for days on end. Cooked is normally sandwiched between a biography of Matt leBlanc and Thomas Cook last-minute offers.

I'm feeling utterly bereft! Everything is so familar and yet so far away.The soundtrack is littered with The Usual, Hog Hoggidy Hog and Kalahari Surfers.People wear kikois as skirts during the day and shawls at night. Justin drinks 'spoek en diesel' and borrows a pan from a local householder since he's forgotten his-making his request hanging out the van to someone in a house that is never erxpected to be anything but a single storey. They make pap with Snowflake flour to go with the waterblommetjie bredie.

Then I get a text from home that makes me want to go home and cuddle my family.

It's only a few months til I go home. I'll get some Steers chips and buy some of their salt to bring back. I'll go up the mountain and look for whales in Hermanus and go to the Waterfront to stock up at the Aromatic Apothecary (and hope the fabulously-named love, revenge and cappucio is still there). I'll revel in being with my family, in my hometown. Doesn't get much better than that

so last millennium

Back in the '90s, when I first went online, the world was a very different place and people now communicate and connect very differently. I used Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and IRC, chatted with people who shared similar interests and even met up a few times. back in the day, only knew one person with a cellphone. Now, I only know one person who doesn't have one- my partially deaf, housebound Scottish grandmother. And there are a myriad ways to engage with people now- Skype helps you talk to your family far away, blogging reaches an audience of none or thousands, you can send the photo you took on your mobile in seconds or share it online. Technology also helps people engage with their environment in new ways- so you can hide things for people to find (like near the local Tesco), cool down in the south by getting sprayed or if you live in the capital, join an impromptu pillowfight.

I've only just acquired a mobile with a colour screen and camera/mp3 player/games etc. Bit of catching up to do...