How quiet, how quiet the chamber is

It's been very nice telecommuting, for all the reasons you might think, but there are irritations and I've been going through a week of them. The first is probably unconnected to my working remotely, or connected only loosely: I discovered that overnight my office computer had crashed and it corrupted a file which had been open at the time of the crash. (I suppose if I were working in office I'd have closed everything before finishing work for the night, but it's dully slow to do that over logmein so I skipped it.) Unfortunately the file was the project manager file for that code, so, I couldn't do anything on this project. The backups I had understood to be run nightly were, in fact, not done on the drive I used for this. So I had to spend, ultimately, a week searching down possible treatments and cursing Visual Studio and, finally, creating a brand-new project containing the old and that was long and boring.

Meanwhile the de facto office manager mailed to tell me of a problem with one page of the code. This problem, it turns out, has to have existed for years and nobody noticed or communicated it to me in all that time, for some reason. And it was in the project with the corrupted file, so this would have been, literally, five minutes to fix even being slow about it, except it had to be done after the project file was rebuilt.

Then, this, which I think is entirely attributable to my working remotely and so being invisible: I did some brilliant hard work in September to make a web page which could analyze blocks of data and send the output to a moderately complicated Excel spreadsheet. This was needed for an urgent need clients has, annually, in October. The office manager mentioned that we had somehow ``missed the deadline'' for this again this year. I do not know for a fact that the problem is the people I mailed with ``I believe this to be done, please test it out and tell me if anything needs changing'' ignored me until the project was moot for a year, but I have to suspect that, and I'm annoyed that a lot of rush coding was apparently unnecessary.

Trivia: An experimental demonstration at the 1891 Frankfurt Exposition showed the transmission of electric power over a hundred miles.
Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986 - 2011, Rick Houston.