Notice: Our systems will be down for about two hours today, starting at 8 a.m. Apologies for the inconvenience.

***

Notice: We know that it’s only 7:30, but we just wanted to remind you about the two hour shortage, in case you forgot. Although, now that we think about it, if you haven’t arrived at work yet, you have recieved this message twice. Apologies.

***

Notice: the time is now 9 a.m., and we are halfway through our maintenance. Should be done in about an hour. Maybe earlier. But probably about an hour.

Apologies.

For the inconvenience.

***

Notice: 10 a.m. Almost done.

***

Notice: We were almost done, but Fred plugged the wrong cord in, and so we’ll be down for a little while longer. Say, oh, five minutes or so. Not bad for government work, huh?

Note: none of us work for the government, but we thought that would be a good joke. Actually, Fred thought that would be a good joke, as he wrote the first part of this notice. The rest of us wrote this second part, which took a few more minutes, so it’ll be about five more minutes on the outage starting now.

Note: Fred reminds us to give you our apologies again, and we had forgotten. So, apologies. Five minutes, starting now.

***

Notice: Well, we fixed what we thought was the problem, but another problem came up, and when we fixed that problem, a few more problems arose. So it’ll be a little bit. Probably another three hours or so.

Not counting the lunch we’re going on right now. We’re heading to Wendy’s. Anyone want anything?

***

Notice: Sally, we weren’t sure whether Wendy’s had an extra large frosty, so we looked up their phone number and called them, and they do not. Please resubmit your order.

Oh, about the outage, it will be another hour or so. Until we get started that is, because we haven’t gone to Wendy’s yet. But we will, and then another three hours or so.

***

Notice: Wendy’s is here. Ted, they did not take the lettuce off your chicken sandwich, you’ll have to take it off yourself. Apologies.

***

Notice: Ok, things are just about up, right on time about 4:00 p.m. We’re about ready to flip the switch here. We’ll send another message in a sec just to make sure the system is working.

***

Notice: By now you’ve probably noticed that the lights have gone out, and hopefully you got out pretty soon after the sprinklers started. Apologies, of course, for that.

Turns out Fred spilled some ketchup from Wendy’s on the server that we didn’t know about, and when we flipped the switch, it made a little chemical ketchup reaction that burnt out the mainframe. So we’re looking at a five or six hour fix here, people. Apolo– well, you know.

Although, we’ve just heard from Fred that the computer store down the street has the exact same model of mainframe that we need (he stopped by there on the Wendy’s run), so we may be able to buy that one, and pull the bad one out and replace it. That would only take about a half hour or so, and we’d be back up and running then.

But, we have to say, this whole day has just kind of frustrated all of us. Seems like it’s one setback after another, first the service, than the outage, then the problems with Sally’s frosty and Ted’s lettuce. Why do you people have to be so picky. And, if we can be frank, Fred has kind of gotten on our nerves.

So, if it’s OK with you all, we think we just might head out for the day. We’ll just– we’ll just be back tomorrow, and think about starting to fix things then.

So, uh, we’ll see you later, ok? All righty. Later.