It’s Thursday night as I write this. Which means that tomorrow (or likely your today) is Friday. Which means that the week is finally, mercifully, at an end.
I don’t know what’s been causing it: the shortened work week, the warmer weather, the crabby people at work, the government shutdown, lack of rain, last space shuttle mission, or a fireworks hangover. It’s been an ugly, difficult week filled with ugly, difficult problems and almost equally ugly, difficult people who were having the problems.
I’m sure it has had a lot to do with one person with a nasty, nagging problem that I’ve ended up having to shepherd through the troubleshooting process as his problem has been passed from one group to another to resolve. And it doesn’t help that my manager asked me to take this over because he had the CIO come down on him because my client complained to his boss, who complained to his higher ups…Until it all came back down again.
This hasn’t been fun. I spent an hour of my Tuesday working with him (he’s in North Carolina, in an area so remote, he needs to go “into town” to get an internet connection), six hours working on the issue on Wednesday, and another two hours today on it, mainly to give a status update to my manager and the five other people I now have involved in trying to fix the problem. It’s to the point where I’m just the coordinator, but like all coordinators, I need to gather information from below and channel results up above me.
And let me just say that is time consuming, tiring, and tedious. It’s kept me from doing my real work…Okay, my other real work, because I still have 30 other tickets that need my attention, so I try to work on them as I have time and (in corporate-speak) “bandwidth.” Which is just exhausting: to have to switch gears so much.
So, I’m glad it’s Friday, even though it’s been a busy week. I’m looking forward to the weekend, and will relish the time that I’ll have to not actually have to do work…Or at least the work that I get paid for.
See you tomorrow.