Mercy Dash

This is the state highway between Springs Junction and Lewis Pass.  No matter how many times I drive it I will never get sick of driving through this beech forest with the trees meeting overhead.

We have had issues with our server at work.  For two days we tried to get it up and running again, to then be told that its power supply has died.  "No problem!" I said, "Just send me a new one."

Ha!  Nope! Our server is so old that parts for it no longer exist.  "Okay," I said in my ignorance, "send me a new server."

Nope!  They need the old one to migrate the data - this could take a week by the time it is couriered to them.  By this time it was too late Friday morning to get it on the courier until Monday, so they wouldn't have it in Christchurch until Tuesday.  Two to three days to do the work and another day and a half to courier it back to us.  Just imagine a week in any business (especially an isolated country school that has on-line learning) with no computer network or internet for more than a week.

I can clearly visualise the reaction of my teachers.  they have been doing their planning etc for this term - all on our computer system.  Which they cannot currently access, with school due to start back on Monday!

So, at 12 midday it became clear that the best option was to do a mercy dash to Christchurch with the server - thus getting the process started at least 3 days earlier.

By 1 pm I was on the road and I made it to the company's Christchurch office with half an hour to spare.   Whew.  I would usually have stopped and taken photos of waterfalls but I didn't have the 5 minutes to spare to set up the tripod etc, so I only allowed myself a 30 second stop for this photo, and one other really quick stop at Culverden for me to buy a coffee and Jasper to have a drink and toilet.

I was back on the road by 5 p.m. heading home.  Dumb!  City traffic all leaving work on a Friday afternoon.  Anyway I decided to stop of the night in Hanmer instead of going all the way home.  By a lucky happenstance my swimwear was still in the car from a swim last week.  

There is a chance that I may be able to pick the server up on Sunday afternoon - which would have it back up and running at school for Monday morning.  By staying in Hanmer I save myself an extra two hours of the return journey to pick it up. I should know by later Saturday afternoon if that will be possible. 

It's just a wait and see exercise now, so I may as well wait in the hot pools at Hanmer.  Can't do anything much at work anyway with the whole computer system down.