12:09 CDT

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Last Thursday, I found out that my work-from-home days may be 
numbered. My boss came in to tell me that it was time to send in the 
telework continuation request again. She also warned me that our new 
Dean of Nursing has been saying 'No' to a lot of them. It's possible 
that I may end up retiring a little ahead of schedule. I filed the 
paperwork. We'll see what happens.

For all of last week, I've been having connection issues with my AT&T 
fiber Internet connection. Each day at 05:00, the connection would 
drop. With one or two restarts of the gateway and router, it would 
come back up again. Friday was the last straw! I had taken the day 
off, and woke up to a dead WAN connection again. I called AT&T to 
report my issues. I told the agent of the dates and times of my 
outages, and the troubleshooting steps I took. 

To his credit, he offered to run a quick line quality test. He did 
acknowledge that he could detect issues from his end. A technician was 
dispatched the next day (Saturday). He confirmed that there were 
issues with the line signal. He reterminated the connection at the ONT 
box, and replaced the gateway and its power supply. He also suggested 
that I bypass the battery backup unit, and plug the gateway directly 
into the outlet.

So far, it's been smooth sailing for the connection. I was expecting 
some pushback from the phone agent. But I'm pleased to report that I 
had an excellent customer experience with AT&T. Maybe I got lucky. 
Maybe they were able to tell that I wasn't some grumpy old Boomer 
shouting at the clouds. I'll take the win, regardless of the 
circumstances.

To add to the story: After the Friday phone call, I checked my router 
status. I saw that a firmware update was ready. I started the update 
(Asus consumer-grade router), and two minutes into the installation, 
the router bricked. I had to rush out to buy a replacement router to 
get my family back online ASAP. Most of my "day off" was spent working 
on my home LAN. I haven't even bothered to see if I can resurrect the 
Asus router. That's a project for another day.

The only real sore spot with this new router (TP-Link) is that there 
is no hostname support for local devices. I have to use static IPs for 
all of my homelab devices until I decide on how I will resolve local 
hostnames. It's only nine devices that I access, so there is no 
rush. There is something to be said for using aliases in my .bashrc 
file. ;)

13:18 CDT

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Forgot to mention that I have cataracts in both eyes. They were 
confirmed yesterday. I'm scheduled for the surgeries later this year. 
There are times when it sucks to get older. ;)