Frustrating day

The university’s file servers have been playing up for the last couple of days, so all the computers have been running incredibly slowly, and today it got even worse.  Every time you try to open a folder (or even just switch from one window to another) it would take a couple of minutes to respond, and half the time it wouldn’t even open, it would just take you back to the root directory and you’d have to start slowly navigating your way back to the folder you wanted again.  And then once you did manage to actually open a file, it was 50/50 whether you’d be able to save it again.  About the only files we could easily access were ones we had stored on USB drives (which is almost none, because of course we use the file servers for storing everything we work on because they’re secure and backed up…).  Add to that the fact that the QuakeStudies site went down (possibly for reasons related to the file server problems, or possibly not, but because the IT people had no idea what was going wrong with the file servers they’d put a total change freeze on the entire network, which mean they wouldn’t let us apply any fixes to the site just in case it affected anything else), and it made for a very frustrating day. It’s very difficult to get any work done when you work for a digital archive and you can’t use the computers…
We did manage to do a wee bit of editing of some marketing material that I just happened to have copied to a USB last week, and Lucy-Jane and I worked on the Friends of CEISMIC photo describer app a bit (though that was also frustrating – for some reason whatever we typed into the description input box wasn’t being picked up properly, and neither of us could figure out what we were doing wrong.  In the end we decided to give up and try again another day when our minds were fresher).
And I’ve still got this cold that’s just not going away and is tiring me out completely.  So yeah, a frustrating day all round.