Network problems causing grief

Last week could have gone so much better but our building is experiencing some network problems.  General sluggishness, high latency and so on have really put a crimp on what I have been able to get done.  Even doing something simple like saving a text file to a shared location can take a minute or two (or it may get done as fast as it ever has - just luck, I suppose).  When behavior like this has cropped up in the past, it generally means there is some hardware somewhere that has burned out, broke or is otherwise in a bad state.  Considering how many folks and machines are in this building, it can take some time to get this fixed, so I'm just waiting it out.

On the odd side, our phones our now all voice over IP.  In practical terms, this means my phone has been acting odd this week as well.  I've been logged out several times and gotten a few messages that told me the network was in such a state that my audio quality was suffering. 

To top this all off, before I knew the network was in its current state, I decided to wipe my main machine so I could reformat and partition the drives more efficiently.  That actually went well since I installed Windows from a thumb drive, but getting all the applications I need installed is bogged down.  Not to mention that I shortsightedly decided not to back anything up before I started on this since I knew all my data was available elsewhere.  So now I don't even have my usual OneNote cache to serve as my fallback. 

On the plus side, though, our IT people are investigating and I expect the problems will get fixed shortly.  Plus, being forced to reinstall everything will make me look through logs, examine setup and in general put a testing focus into those areas.

And for those of you emailing me, please bear with me a little longer here.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John