More fun with email (AKA, my own personal hell)

I got to the office 5 hours ago and have yet to do any actual work. It's got nothing to do with lack of projects or lack of motivation (I actually have a ton to do, since I'm leaving for a big overseas trip tomorrow). The problem (surprise surprise) is that my email hasn't worked since I got here. They took the server down last night for an "upgrade" and apparently forgot to turn it back on. I've been getting IMs from half the office asking why email doesn't work (because I have ALL the answers), and over the course of the last few hours, most of my esteemed colleagues have regained functionality.

Sadly, I have not. I try to open outlook and that lovely little box pops up saying that the program is retrieving data from the exchange server and asking me to wait. There's a little blue bar that moves from the left side of the box to the right, which is usually some sort of progress indicator. Unfortunately, when the little blue bar gets almost all the way to the right side of the screen, it jumps all the way back to zero, like a big F-U from the powers that be of computing. this went on for about an hour at first and then stopped. Lo and behold, I HAD EMAIL...but it was not to be. I made the mistake of trying to delete one of the 85 new messages asking if I wanted a bigger rocket in my pants. There was that evil little box again...flipping me off in its own special way...for another hour. During this round of hilarity, our IT manager peeked into my office and asked if I was functioning properly. I laughed and showed her the little box from hell. She asked me if I knew what was wrong (um...yes...it doesn't work). She sat down at my desk and stared at it for a good 20 minutes before taking a screen grab of the error and trying to email it to herself...using that same outlook that hasn't worked all day. In an effort to suppress my now destructive and homicidal urges, I walked away while she sat there, dumbfounded. After about 45 minutes, I went back to check in and was told "I think it's working now" (because, you know, a definitive answer is always great). Her parting words to me were "your PC is very old. complain to HR so they give you a new one" (because I never thought of that before). As I sit here closing in on hour #6 of watching my computer give me the virtual finger, I'm getting calls from my co-workers asking why I'm not responding to their emails (at least 3 of said emails are asking me whether or not email is working)...there's construction going on right above us too, which is good because the hammering is drowning out the sound of me banging my head on my desk over and over and over again.

Looks like I hit "post" too soon. Just got caught slamming head on desk. Have to resume banging head on desk now, as the one who caught me came to ask why she can no longer track changes in PowerPoint. Apparently at some point in the 8 years she's been using the program, she was able to do that (despite the fact that nobody else ever could, and despite the fact that she and I had this exact same conversation 2 days ago).