I can’t even tell you how busy this work day has been. I haven’t had a minute over the last four hours where I haven’t been on a conference call. It’s nuts. I have to go pee, and I need to eat lunch, and neither is an option right now and won’t be for a while.
Here’s a cat. I hope it helps.
I had 15 minutes to go until a meeting with a customer. Not just any meeting, but a meeting where I was going to have to present something to them. Now I don’t talk to customers directly. It’s not in my job description. That being said, we’re all in this together and we are all one big happy team, and if the folks who usually do talk to the customers directly are tied up in other things I am happy to pitch in. Happy yes, stress free? Hell no.
The information I needed to present would, best case scenario, involve two, maybe three sentences and that was it. If they asked me questions I told the people I was covering for that I would panic quietly and then mumble responses until they stopped asking. I was kidding, of course. I didn’t expect any questions. I expected my speaking time to be wrapped up in a manner of seconds. Still… yikes.
Then that happy moment, about 15 minutes before the meeting… when our entire network went down. Oh… no… now what do we do??
I wasn’t going to be able to join the call… potentially neither was any of the other 50-70 or so people who were scheduled to represent my company… and we had no way of letting each other know, and no way of letting the customer know. What do we do?
One guy in my building who fortunately sits near me found a work around and yelled it out. Everyone else yelled it out too. I got onto the call with seconds to spare, then waited about 20 minutes for my turn to speak, then spoke my two sentences and asked for questions and there were none.
Oh, what a relief that was. Over and done.
After that I spent two hours on another meeting and now I am going to spend the next 90 minutes on yet another meeting. What a thrill! I just want to go home and go to bed.
We just had a really frustrating issue come up at work. The customer had access to their system locked down hard, for perfectly valid and acceptable reasons. They had issues with applications crashing and we couldn’t get in to see what happened. There were a slew of people from my company, the hardware vendor, and the customer on a conference call and we were all totally stumped. Then one of our tech guys and one of the tech guys from the hardware vendor started hammering away at it and they figured it out.
Sometimes this software support stuff can be incredibly frustrating, but when those frustrating moments get resolved… oh man is that satisfying. Even in a case like this where the folks who support my application ended up being innocent bystanders (the issue and the fix ended up having zero to do with us) it is still immensely satisfying.
Huge tip of the hat to the two guys who eventually worked it all out. As the commercials used to say, it’s Miller time*.
*It’s not Miller time for me. I don’t drink. The sentiment still works though.
Inside the Red Head's Head 