Working in a Small Company Sucks Sometimes

I really wish we could afford to buy stuff like Active Directory Reports at work. Unfortunately, with just 60 people working there, we can’t drop $500 on a package that only “shows pretty graphs” (as my boss would say). The fact is, you can get that information other ways (like running around to each machine), and it’s just not worth it…

*Sigh* I can dream though, can’t I?

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7-5-2006
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6:30 am
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128
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66
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12 Maddening Hours

I spent 12 total hours banging my head against a maddening problem.

Our DBA at work is off until Wednesday, but we needed to get an export sent to a company by Friday, absolute latest. Promblem is, this export doesn’t take into account a new set of people who have a special plan setup.

In comes Chris. I don’t know how the export’s done, more than that it’s taking Oracle data and spitting it out somehow using a Delphi app. Less than 24 hours later, I’ve added 300 lines of SQL to the export stored procedure, taught myself how to re-compile and test a stored procedure, checked my logic, and fixed the Delphi app so that it’ll spit out the correct fields that I’ve added in certain records.

Re-compile the Delphi project and check everything back in to SourceSafe, and it’s time to call it a day… and by that I mean pick up another project incredibly similar to this last one… Oh no, have I opened a door here?

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6-29-2006
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5:45 pm
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95
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167
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Happy Memorial Day

Welp, yesterday was Memorial day. Now that it’s come and gone, we don’t get another vacaction until July 4th rolls around here at work. Fortunately, I think I’m nearing the end of the list of crap I have to get done ASAP… which will return me to the even longer list of crap that I have to get done… sometime…

Anyway. As I was sitting at home yesterday, enjoying my day off, I got to wondering something. When US companies are closed on major holidays such as this (or July 4th, Thanksgiving, what have you) that fall on days that have no significance to other countries, does it affect anyone outside the US?

Since I know many of you readers are actually foreigners (to me… to you, obviously, you’d be a native), I thought I’d ask. Does it affect your place of work when the US is closed? What if you work for a company that’s based out of the US but has offices abroad? Do any of the offices ever actually close? Just the ones in the US? All of them?

For some reason I’ve actually started asking these kinds of questions lately, and they usually get met with a “Huh? Who the hell cares?!” kind of response from the people around me. They’ve started to think I’m more and more weird lately, but the truth is… I’ve always been this way, just quieter. Maybe I do think about things too much. I guess it’s true that ignorance is bliss…

Screw bliss…

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5-30-2006
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8:28 am
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129
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253
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I’m running off to join the Peace Corps…

So there’s this woman I work with who has an insanely hot daughter that I’ve been trying to hook up with for quite a while. It started out trying to get a date with her daughter, then moved into a somewhat joking mood when it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen.

From joking, it moved into what could best be described as shock-and-awe mode when her daughter started dating a guy a little odler than I a month or two ago.

From comments about what a loser the guy wa (without ever even meeting him, of course) to pointing out just how lcose his hand was to her ass int hat picture, I kept insisiting to the mother what a bad influence this guy was and how we needed to work together to get rid of him.

Then came today.

There’s this party our HR manager at work is throwing Saturday night. I’m going, so I asked the woman I work with if she was going to bring her daughter with her. She said she wasn’t going to be able to attend, but she’d asked her daughter if she wanted to go, but she hadn’t. We exchanged a few emails joking around about it, with me making comments about not wanting her daughter in my fantasies anyway. I mean, who needs hot, drunken girl-on-girl action anyway? Let’s be realistic here…

Anyway, in the last two emails we exchanged, her mom told me that her boyfriend wanted to meet me…

Umm… Yikes. I mean, I know I’ve said some really crazy things about him and his amazingly hot girlfriend, and I know that her mom’s told her these things. But honestly, I didn’t mean anything by it. Why in the world would he want to meet little old me?

Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of… Should I go ahead and bandage up my nose and pretend someone madder than him got to me first? In my last email, I told her I had no idea why he’d want to meet me, then asked her if I’d mentioned that I had joined the Peace Corps and they were shipping me out to Uganda and that we’d have to wait 6 to 8 years until I got back… Think they’ll buy it?

I didn’t think so… Showing up at work on Monday is probably going to be a dead giveaway that I didn’t join the Peace Corps, right?

So, anyone have advice? Ever had to confront the existing boyfriend of a hot chick you wanted to get with? I’ve been the guy the girlfriend cheated on the boyfriend with before, but I’ve never been the guy that’s had to confront the boyfriend before… Ahh, my education continues as I turn 21…

On an only slightly related note, I wrote this post after having taken about 5 shots of Crown Royal… It was nasty, but it did the trick. Can you tell? Gee, if only I could remember where that polls widget for Wordpress was…

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5-18-2006
Date
9:50 pm
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101
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500
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Not a Bad Monday So Far…

As a sort of follow-up to my last post, in which I said it was bound to be a good Monday since I got some new Security Monkey goodness this morning, I thought I’d let you all know how my day actually went (at least thus far).

Class was spiffy. We were wrapping up our review for the CCNA, and I was just on the ball. Every question they lobbed at me, I was smacking it right back. Sure there are a few areas I need to review before I go up to battle that beast, but I think I’m off to a good start so far.

After class, I headed off to work. I finished a few manual tape backups and checked in on our automated network backup, just to make sure all the changes I made last Friday actually went alright and everything finished over the weekend without incident. It looked like they had, so I restored the original backup schedules for a final test tonight. After importing about 4,000 claims, I finished babysitting the tape backup that was running, started the next one, and headed out for a late lunch at the holy green shrine to the coffee bean (Starbucks).

On the way back from lunch, I was behind a Greer City cop, doing 50 in a 35 down South Highway 14. All of a sudden, we pass a large Ford Blazer-type vehicle and I catch blue lights out of the corner of my eye as an unmarked Greenville County Sherrif car behind me nabs him (the Blazer). Wow, That was close, I think to myself as I slow down to a mere 10 over the speedlimit and continue on my way back to work.

Just as I’m about to make the merge from I-85 onto I-385, doing 78 or so in a 60, I come around a bend and see more blue lights, as a State Trooper slows and pulls off the road behind a Ford Taurus. Wow, if I’d been about 20 seconds earlier, I could have been the car he decided to nab instead.

Is it really possible that I could have been that lucky twice in a row?

Oh, it is. And I owe it all to Security Monkey. His bloggy goodness has become a prophecy. When he blogs, life is good. When he doesn’t blog… Well, we won’t speak of such dark times (but notice that there was no case file published last Monday before my accident. I think that speaks for itself…).

Security Monkey, I plead with you… Continue the amazing case files… for my sake!

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5-1-2006
Date
12:13 pm
Time
92
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427
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