Monday 7^th April

Up bright and early, ready for a good start to the new branch.  Or at least I was until we had to wait over an hour for a taxi which ten took us every which way but to the office, so it was nearly 11 by the time we made it in.  No worries though, I could get straight on with connecting up the router.  Ah! I could if the router wasn’t in a locked comms room out in the corridor, and the IT people for the building won’t be around for a while yet.

Time for a nice cuppa chai then.

Eventually the IT guy turns up and within about 5-10 minutes I’ve traced the necessary cables back through the spaghetti mess which most comms racks inevitably resemble and got the VPN connection back to the UK over all those thousands of miles.  It’s quite fascinating really if you’re that way inclined.  Nik cracks on with checking the workstations while I configure the server, and we’re back on track.

Again, the people inside the office are sweet as can be, offering tea, chocolates and a selection of dried fruit and nuts to keep us going.

We stay as late as we can to make up for the lost time this morning  but one of the systems has got a nasty set of viruses on it, which is stopping us from applying the latest updates on it.  I get rid of a few, but the people in the branch need to go home so I use the +7 hour time difference to my advantage and ask the lads in the UK to look at it while we lock up for the night.  We call it a day and take the taxi ride back over the river to Grotsville, a quick meal in the hotel “restaurant” then hit the sack to try to catch a decent night’s sleep.