Woke up this morning at 3am, found 4" of snow. Shoveled a walkway in the backyard for the dogs, then took the top layers off of the 'potty area' so they could at least do their business without having to wade thru snow that was up to their bellies. Then back to bed.

Woke up again at 5:45 - now we have 7" of snow. *sigh* Shoveled the backyard again. Roads look horrible. I have to shovel the driveway before I can get out, or I will be pushing snow with my bumper and undercarriage - always a not-so-good thing. I'll be late for work - but at least I should make it. Perhaps the roads will improve by the time I'm ready to leave.

Yesterday was spent working with tech support for the Xerox printer and the BrightStor backup software.

the Xerox tech told me that the extended maintenance kit (40,000 pages) isn't warranted to give more pages than the standard maintenance kit (10,000 pages) even though it costs twice as much and its major selling point is that it has quadruple the capacity. Apparently the page numbers are simply MAXIMUMS. No warranty on them unless they fail within 20% of new. Since mine failed at 31%, it is OBVIOUSLY not in warranty any more. I protested, got passed up to another tech, who shipped me another Ext Maint Kit overnight - without an argument. Sometimes you get the good techs, sometimes you don't.

The BrightStor tech told me that it 'really wasn't their problem because nobody else is having trouble with the Windows 2000 client'. Uh-huh. I'll be working with the same BrightStor tech again today, even though I contacted the Cust. Svc. Mgr and told her that I considered the problem to be more than the current tech could handle. She agreed to escalate it to another tech once we gave the current fellow 'one more chance'. Nothing like having to work with a tech support guy who KNOWS that you just requested an escalation because you consider him underqualified. Lovely.