My Eyes are really open, really!

Ok, I am sitting at my desk typing this with my eyes practically half closed. Why? That was because I couldn't connect to my company's virtual private network last night, well, theoretically I did manage to connect but it was extremely slow. Because of this, I had to drive 40minutes all the way down to Cyberjaya and log in from there. Cursing all the way while blasting my music on my car stereo, desperately trying to concentrate on the road while navigating my way through the haze which provided a visibility of less than 200m, I managed to reach the office in one piece. I quickly logged on, completed my work, sent a couple of emails to my esteemed colleagues in the US and logged off. At least that was how it turned out to be, what I summarised in a line actually took about 2 hours, not including travel time.

The story began when I tried to connect from home via my Streamyx connection, which evidently was too slow for me. So I went out to the local Starbucks to leech off their free Wi-Fi service, which was a little better but still slow. It was so slow that it actually took me about 5-10minutes just to open an email. After that, I went over to Chuen's place and after that I finally caved in and headed out to Cyberjaya, our intelligent city.

So it was a pretty interesting night for me, here I am sitting at my desk with my cheeks all red from blushing. Why? Well the first thing I did when I arrived earlier just now was to log on to my laptop which by the way, took about 15minutes to boot up. Then my smartcard got locked out and after a quick call to the Helpdesk, I managed to get it unlocked. By then my patience level was running thin, and I bet my next call to the Helpdesk to complain about my VPN connection wouldn't be very pleasant as well. So after all the hassle and finally logged on the network, I gave the Helpdesk a call and they were very courteous and directed my complaint to the remote access team. This is where my superbly skilled engineering cum IT skills came into true sight; it was oblivious that I didn’t have any.

The call only lasted 5 minutes, the cause? I was logged on to the wrong VPN gateway. Being here in Malaysia, I was supposed to log on to the Asia Pacific gateway but little did I know that I was connected to the Europe gateway instead. Very good, Mark, very good indeed! Oh well, so much for irony today, time to get on with my life!