As you can probably guess just from the title, today wasn’t exactly the best in the record books.
I walk in, only about 10 minutes late (which is about as close to being on time as I ever get), and sit down at my desk to try and learn about the phone crap I’m supposed to be an expert at now. I get about 45 minutes worth of work done, when someone comes over and asks Matt a question that I can’t hear (he’s our web developer by the way) and they both leave.
A few minutes later, Matt comes back and tells me that she has one of the biggest spyware infestations he’s ever seen. I tell him I’ll go take care of it in a minute, already perturbed that she had bothered him with something that has nothing to do with his field of expertise or job description.
After another few minutes, Matt comes back and asks if we have Ad Aware downloaded on the network somewhere. I tell him yes, that it’s out there with everything else, but that give me a minute and I’ll go install it, that I’m trying to make a point, that I’ve been ignored on the spyware issue several times already just this year, and that it’s a very big issue that no one cares about but me (since I’m the only one that has to waste his time going around cleaning it all up all over the building).
Matt says ok and disappears again. Another few minutes later, he comes back and says that he went ahead and installed Ad Aware anyway, but that my point is in no danger of being overlooked. Well, even though I didn’t believe him at the time, it turns out it was true. Not only was it the biggest spyware infestation I’d ever seen, anywhere, but it was also almost 3x our previous record. After 3 scans with Ad Aware, 2 reboots of the machine, and 897 infected items later, I left the machine thinking my task was done and it was now safe to finally go to lunch.
Matt and I went to Baileys, as per usual. I actually legitimately won the last game. It’s amazing how well I can actually do when I take my time, line up my shot, and make a very controlled execution of my plan.
Anyway, after lunch, we stopped by Liquid Highway, as is our typical daily routine. Alecia was working again. She was the one that came out and took our order, and also made my coffee and handed it to us when she was done. This was the first time I’d really seen her in a semi-peaceful and private environment since Matt and Byron noticed the ring.
Which brings me to another disturbing thought. Matt and Byron were wondering if Alecia had always had the ring on her finger, since they’d never noticed it before. At first, I thought it was just that normally she was making the coffee and generally didn’t wear it. Unfortunately, several times lately she has had it on when she was making coffee. This has been greatly depressing for me, but I’m not really sure what to do about it. Waitresses in general are tough to ask out (as we learned from Katie last week), but Alecia would be much more difficult, considering I don’t have an entire meal to try and talk to her. No, I’m not that lucky. I only have a few minutes, at most, not to mention that generally I’m also with at least Matt (if not Byron too), and that there are generally many other people in line and working at Liquid Highway too.
Anyway, I’ve babbled on far longer about this than I really intended, so on with the story of my day. After lunch, just as we walk through the door, I see Jeff walking out of our area back to his desk. He sees me and flags me down. He says the machine I was working on earlier still isn’t working and appears to be just about the same as it was. Now, just when I was starting to eel a tad bit better about the day, God decides to piss down upon my life once again.
With great disgust, I growl something about formatting it, and starting fresh, because I’m tired of wasting my time working on it. So, for the rest of the afternoon, I wasted most of my time re-i9nstalling everything.
To top the afternoon off, I also couldn’t figure out my problem with the phone server that recently became my problem, but I also had to finish the desktop I started on Friday, get interrupted three times while trying to learn the phone stuff, explain myself to three different bosses (no, no Office Space pun there, total truth), and run across the building to solve a problem that I could have very simply answered from my desk in less than 10 seconds if the person had simply given me all the information the first time (do they actually expect “It doesn’t work” to really help me diagnose a real problem?).
So, in what was supposed to be a short recap of my day from hell, you now know why I may have been in such a bad mood.
In actuality, my day wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if we actually did things properly. For example, if we actually disciplined the Customer Service employee that couldn’t work all day because she’d gotten her computer so infested with spyware. After all, you don’t get infested by spyware by browsing to websites for medical facilities (which would be the only ones that should be viewed on company time if that company is an insurance company). Even if we didn’t fire someone, but simply reprimanded them, at least that would be something. Or maybe if we actually enforced rules about people constantly disturbing the IT guys by walking into their cubes whenever they have the slightest problem. Why not just write an email or give us a call? Why? Because that means you might not get the instant results you seem ot get if you walk over and bother them in person. Never mind that we always answer our phones and prefer email to anything, simply because it doesn’t require any physical human interaction.
The one last thing of any interest today was picking up a refill for my prescription. The pharmacy we go to used to be a bank, so you can just drive up to the window, put our co pay in the drawer, and pull out the bottle when they pass it back out. The entire process took, at most, 2 minutes, including the guy in the window asking if I minded him forging my signature on the form.
Blah, anyway, I’m done ranting and rambling about things that neither concern, nor likely interest anyone but myself. So, now that I have finished off my day, I’ll let everyone go.
I really need to learn that “Blog” means SHORT entries about day-to-day life.