I feel like I dropped a ball at work. I did not, but I feel like I did.

One of the guys in my group was struggling with an issue on Friday. He was sending out chat messages to the rest of us during the morning and I was chipping in where I could. His problem involved a functionality that 10 years ago I was the authority on. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to look into it myself, but I am still often the guy who can straighten things out even though I don’t personally support customers anymore and therefore never have this sort of issue assigned to me directly.

He asked if anyone was available to jump on a video chat and look things over with him. Right about the same time my boss’ boss pulled a whole bunch of people, including me, into a different discussion and I had to shift my focus to that. By the start of the work day today (Monday) my issue was pretty much worked out but my coworker was still struggling. He was on another video call with a few people from other groups and they were trying to figure out what was going wrong. I joined the call and within a few minutes knew what the problem was and how to fix it.

Damn it.

By 10:00am today everything was fine and dandy and right as rain. That’s good. What I am upset with myself about is that if I could have just freed up a few minutes on Friday I could have saved my coworker a lot of stress and had it all wrapped up three days earlier. The customer would have been happy, my coworker would have been happy, and I would have felt like a (very minor) hero. Instead, I feel like let everyone down. Again, I did not, and the thing I was looking at on Friday is really important and has all sorts of upper management eyes on it, but I still wish I could have been there for my coworker sooner than I was. That’s all.