Actually I Didn't Go Without…

…but I had to order in person! The horrors!

And of course, the day went downhill from there.

I left my laptop at work and powered on Thursday afternoon when I left, so it received the dreaded Crowdstrike update that brought so many industries to a grinding halt today. I was dead in the water, stuck in a boot loop, rendered my laptop useless. I knew how to get back in (and was able to log in to a couple other devices that had been offline when the botched patch was pushed out, but I needed the Bitlocker key to get back into mine via Recovery Mode, and at the time the only source for that data was our Help Desk. "Thank you for calling. You are caller number 28."

Ugh.

Thankfully cleverer minds than mine arrived on the scene, by the time I'd dropped to caller 26 (a half hour later) and after coordinating with main ITS—because they have contacts that I do not—a solution was proffered. Unfortunately, that was long after I realized I had no current backup on my data and had torn my laptop apart to remove the SSD and slave it via a USB adapter to another machine just to get my data off of it in case. Of course as soon as I'd removed it from the machine I realized that wasn't going to work because it was encrypted with Bitlocker and unreadable. FML.

My former boss (because of aforementioned connections) got the solution to this mess shortly thereafter, and after running through the steps I was up and running again. There weren't a ton of affected devices in our Department, but enterprise-wide it was estimated to be about 5000…

Fortunately that was a case of "Not my circus, not my monkeys," but I still had to end up going offsite to one of the satellite offices to take care of three non-responsive desktop machines we were responsible for. (ITS sent out an enterprise-wide notice that everyone who was unable to log in to bring their laptops to our central location to have the fix applied—or work with I.T. Staff in their respective departments.

It was still a clusterfuck of a day, no matter which way you look at it, and certainly not the way I had envisioned today going.