Some Days…

"Some days it don't pay to get outta bed!" The Foghorn Leghorn, Merrie Melodies, 1948

Ever have one of those days where it goes from reasonably fine to “Well, I may as well go to KFC and lick the deep-fryer ‘till my heart stops” in like, an instant? Well, for me, that instant came at roughly 9:54 AM today, when I, in a typically unassuming fashion, waddled through the door to CICS and issued my languid “Hello” to the charming secretary. The placid environment was altered radically the next instant when I heard “Ryan, I need to see you.” from just around the corner. If I was talking to a C language programmer, I would tell him that about then, my “Day” property was set equal to “Suck.”

“Ryan, did you know that you and Dinesh are responsible for this week’s lab?”

“… no.”

“Yes, I called him a little bit earlier, you two were supposed to have read Chapter 10 and you need to set up the lab for our meeting this morning.”

“Really?” (Phone rings in my pocket) “Hello?”

“Hey, Wolfgang. Did you know we’re supposed to present on Chapter 10 this morning?”

“…”

That turned out to have been a fairly stressful morning. Dinesh and I had an hour to familiarize ourselves with router-to-switch networking, configuring, and subnetting. Attempts to print off the lab material from the web turned out to be a more of a chore than it should have been. Took seven minutes for me to get one of the computers booted up. Seven minutes. We sure do have some crappy equipment lying around.

Fast forward about fifteen minutes. Dinesh and I were still flopping around, mildly shell-shocked at how monstrous Chapter 10 is, primarily, because at this point we were going to have to present it in about half an hour. With the multi-flavored Ethernet cables at our disposal, we hastily decided to focus on just one of the six sections that Chapter 10 had to offer, and set up a simple topology that we could talk about without looking like fools. Time was aggressively melting off of the clock as we gently lost our minds wondering why the “Good job, guys” light wasn’t turning on when we plugged our cross-over cable into the switch. We saw through the window that people were beginning to file into the conference room, heralding the approach of 11:00 AM. At about 11:03, we couldn’t ignore the beckoning hand-gestures of the instructor any longer, and we marched stalwartly into the Conference Room of Doom.

At about 12:14 PM, the last of the students exited the lab, and Dinesh and I just looked at each other blankly. The presentation, the configuration, and the entire lab had gone about as smoothly as anybody could’ve asked for. Thanks, primarily, to Dinesh, who had brilliantly spent about thirty-four minutes drawing network diagrams on the write-n-wipe board. I told him thank you, and that I was going to buy him lunch. Somehow, he wound up buying me lunch. Mission accomplished.

I can’t say enough about how sweet the touch of God has been these past few weeks. I don’t know what I would do without those prayer meetings on Sunday nights.

Anderson University is now officially the number one DIII rugby team in Indiana.

-Ryan