Well, it's Monday all right

Monday morning. Nothing on the beeper, amazingly enough. Instead, I get a phone call from the boss of the internal IT group. Who says that during the Sunday, our Exchange server ate its own guts, that she and one of her technicians have been working for 26 hours straight trying to get it back up again and could I please check the status of the backups from that machine?

Yay.

Anyway, I get to work and we start looking at it. Now, I'm no Windows expert by any stretch of the imagination. I gleefully left that world behind back in 1990, and have done my best to stay the hell away from it ever since. This morning has been a wonderful confirmation of the wisdom of that policy. We came up with, oh, ten or fifteen different ways to try to fix the problem. All of them failed because Windows simply would not do something that should be trivial. Like copying data from one disk to another (yes, really, and I don't really want to know why). Or try to tell Exchange to look for its data somewhere else (apparently it wants to see the old, broken data before it'll deign to look elsewhere, and we lose again). Remaining solution? The tried and true Microsoft Way: wipe and reinstall from scratch.

And once more I wonder, why do people put up with the disease-ridden heap of dung that is Microsoft Windows? Worse, why do they pay for it?

And it just keeps being Monday

I think I'll go home now and have that very large whisky I couldn't have last week.