History vs urine

It’s been another one of those days with too much to fit in one entry. Karma is overworked, so he asked me to go to Paro dzong in his stead. They were complaining of viruses and not being able to access the internet. Since the internet was working when it was set up a few months ago, he suspected the problems were related. For me, it was a first because I’d never been allowed into the office areas of the dzong castles as a tourist.

We got an early start and I picked up Robin, Karma’s lead technician and the newest employee, Nadi and made it through the roadworks to arrive in Paro by 9am. We marched past the police checkpoint without stopping to sign in as I’d done every time previously. Then up the ancient wooden stairs on the left to an open, defensive platform. From there, it was a short step down a corridor to the server room, but I was in an entirely different world. Surely they didn’t have hallways with plywood walls when the castle was built 350 years ago!

All the windows were open in the server room, allowing visitors to look out onto the inner cloister unhindered. And that would surely make it the first open air server room I’ve ever come across. After familiarising myself with the network topology, we headed into look at the statistics officer’s PC. It was a natural choice as he used to be the IT guy. Trying to get a new antivirus on his PC and scanning for viruses took a few hours, so I made the time to look around. His room was small, but it was proper compressed mud castle walls, strangely painted yellow.

‘Just think. This room has probably been a monk’s room for the last few hundred years.’
‘Not a monk. A warrior’s I think.’ Wishful thinking, I think, but possible.
‘Either way, how does it feel to work in a room with that much history.’
He thought for a while. ‘The history’s OK. It’s the smell of urine that bothers me.’
Apparently the monks’ toilets are just underneath the offices so the whole area smells, but you get used to it, they tell me.

non-IT people tune out now.
In the end, the biggest problem they had was that half the people in the office seem to have ‘disabled’ their LAN connections in Windows. Another was that a cable had come unplugged and as it was the cross connect between switches, about 10 PCs were affected. And lastly, someone had sold them a few PCs with XP, 1.8GHz processors, but only 128MB of RAM. I haven’t had this much fun since… Actually I’m glad I don’t have that much fun any more.

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