Last night I was pretty perturbed at OOo – openoffice.org. To clarify, I wasn’t miffed because the site was down. You have to take them down sometimes, to migrate to a new server. Or so I’ve been told. I don’t care.

I was peeved because the page they put up to let us know that OOo was down didn’t mention OOo. There was no way to tell if you were reaching the right address, and finding the site under repair, or reaching the wrong address altogether. 

It’s like calling your friend Bob and hearing a voicemail greeting that says Dave’s not here right now, call back tomorrow. Ha ha ha.

Maybe you keep trying to call Bob, in case you mis-dialed. You waste time trying in vain to get through. I wasted time trying to reach OOo, because I had no good reason to think that it was really OOo that was down. It said CollabNet was down.

Then I starting to worry that my PC had another pharking virus, because a few years ago, my old Dell got a virus that started sending me to the wrong sites. The address would be right, but I’d wind up somewhere else. And then it killed the operating system and I had to reformat the hard drive.

That’s what I was thinking about last night, when the OpenOffice.org site said “CollabNet is currently down for scheduled maintenance….”

And I don’t care if CollabNet hosts OOo on its servers or something. They should have gone to the trouble to be clear. The Internets are big and slippery tubes, and we should have zero tolerance for fools who waste our time.
Lookin’ for Bob? Dave’s not here. Ha ha ha.

OOo was back up this morning, with no explanation for their sudden, apparently psychotic overnight name change. I guess they got back on their meds. Collabnet went back from whence it came. And I’m still not amused.