This, dear readers, has been a day and a half. As you know, I was up at six, announced, printed out a bunch of orders, and went back to bed around seven-thirty. When I got up at ten-thirty I could not get on the Internet, I could not print orders, I could not do anything. I called Time Warner - no problem on their end, and they had me do all the stuff they always have you do - none of which helped. I then called Apple and spent the next two and a half hours on the phone, doing every sort of troubleshooting, all to no avail. They kicked me up to a senior technician, who had me do scads of other things, all to no avail. He finally asked if he could call back in twenty minutes so he could go to the top echelon. He did, and we did more things - we then tried one final thing - he had me change the DNS ip address (don't ask me what any of it means) - we did, and voila, everything worked. He put me on an open (or public) DNS ip. He thinks that I either have to get a new modem or Time Warner was behaving weirdly and my modem was not feeding the DNS address to the wireless router properly. It certainly had to be that because once we changed it I was on. By that time it was three in the afternoon and I spent the next ninety minutes printing out hundreds of orders, and answering e-mails. It was madness personified, but at least it's working now. I made the call that I needed to make but the person was not there, so I left a message and we'll have that call tomorrow, I guess. Early in the morning I wrote the helper - one line, "Please let me know what time you can drop off the invoices - you can leave them on the porch - thanks, and much appreciated. I think you can guess that I never heard back.
I wrote another e-mail around one - this time I laid out for her in very nice terms what I think is going on - i.e. the only thing I can think of that makes sense. This girl has some pretty severe emotional problems stemming from events in her childhood and those problems manifest themselves in certain ways. I've tried to help her, in fact, understand how to deal with them, and some of the advice I gave her, she told me, actually worked. I think she got scared - I think she thought somehow I would yell at her or do some kind of scene or whatever craziness was going on in her head. So, I told her I was not the boogeyman, that I've only ever been nice and supportive and there for her, and that all I cared about at this point was getting the invoices back. I laid out several scenarios (the tone was always light) - drop them off when I'm not here, mail them back, or I'd have a mutual friend contact her and she could give them to that person.
And that's what I did - I called Barry Pearl and he called her and left a very nice message offering to be the intermediary. Needless to say, I never heard back (who knows if she's even reading my e-mails), but hopefully she'll call Barry back and we can wrap this up - or she can mail them. I just want it done, and then I want no contact with her ever again.
I talked to two potential replacements, one of whom would be very short term - I'd prefer someone who can be around for awhile, but the short term person will work if I can't find anyone for the next couple of weeks.
