As we say in Yorkshire "it's white o'er ‘aht theer". Which, for those of thee not familiar with the local parlance, translates as ‘it's snowing thick and fast and we've quite a covering outside of Plusnet Towers'. The traffic seems to be moving (just) and the buses still running but I'm not planning on hanging about too long today. I hope the late shift in the CSC have brought their sleeping bags 
And with the forecasts saying more snow overnight I think it'll be nice trog in again tomorrow for many of us not working from home. I know the networks guys and gals have been monitoring the amount of ‘remote access' traffic today. For those of you working from home and accessing your files and intranets over VPN, SSH or Remote Desktop, it's important that your traffic remains prioritised on the network and doesn't suffer any congestion at all. So, not quite the sort of extreme weather we saw during the floods of June 2007 but... Wait.. News just in.. The buses have now stopped running I've been told. Great. Andrew provides us this update from the CSC: Amidst the impending economy-crippling doom predicted by the media from the onset of some snow, the support team in the CSC have braved the harsh, Siberian-style winter this morning and this afternoon and trekked to Plusnet Towers. Safe to say we're all here ok, toasty and warm, ready to deal with all of your technical queries and calls. Looking outside our cosy office however, the poor commuters are having a terrible time enduring the harsh reality of...err.....winter. Hopefully the pizza delivery will still arrive safely when the traffic has subsided, and fingers crossed we don't get snowed in, as there certainly don't appear to be enough Wispas, Haribo, or caffeine-related products to get us through the night. From our Top 5 today it does look like a number of our customers are being affected by the inclement conditions however:
- Llllloooooaaaaaadddddsssssss of no sync faults today. This is more than likely related to the heavy snow fall across much of the UK, as these problems don't tie in with any service outages reported by our wholesale suppliers.
- Sales queries. Lots of customers calling to get further information on our incredibly good value Broadband and Home Phone packages, and lots of people signing-up too.
- Router setup. As always, we've had lots of people getting their usernames incorrect, or having trouble setting up routers as they've been sent the wrong instructions GRRRR! That's our bad, but we've put measures in place to deal with this.
- Provisioning updates. These have consisted of the usual order updates and people ringing back providing further information (i.e. MAC keys) or chasing delayed orders (due to problems such as DACS on the line).
- We've also had quite a few data transfer issues since an update to Norton was released over the weekend.
Well now, Rys from Development doesn't appear to have noticed it's snowing. Apparently it snowed today. Dev haven't noticed because we're either busy in the after effects of the recent power outage, in crunch mode on project work, or pushing hard on other existing work streams. That means there was no time today for me to fall on my backside and bruise it on the way to work, or to make a snowball this lunchtime and leave it on someone's desk to melt. No sir, none of that happened. Finally, for today at least, here's Matt in Comms: Well in spite of the universal (at least as far as Sheffield is concerned) need to stay in your house the moment a sniff of any white stuff is falling, the entirety of Comms made it into the office today. Yay us. Well, except Chris who is excused because he booked today off anyway. We're expecting photos of your snowman, Chris. Well I've spent today getting the newsletter ready for sending this week, which it is. Which is nice. Mand has been picking up problems and updating some Best Practices. James has been training for most of the day; those bits when he wasn't were spent in the forums, except for his lunchtime game of pool. Bob has been absent since four so I can't ask him what he's been doing, though it's probably quite safe to assume he's been dealing with email stuff and networks change controls. Today we have mostly been talking about Thumbman on Twitter. It made us laugh. Another one of those crazy 'viral' Internet things that I have to ask someone what it means. Not now though.. now is the time to put those walking boots on. Until tomorrow then dear reader. Peter