Work bytes
Sometimes my work days seem long. Sometimes they are long, but not for the obvious reasons.
Right now we're into a busy period. That's all fine and dandy. I expect it, I anticipate it, it's okay. What I don't plan for is having computer issues. We know our computers are old. In fact, we've recently purchased fresh new-ish ones (they may be refurbished), but we've been too busy to install them. Also, someone who used to work for us who now is more of a consultant would need to set them up, and that has to be done on his schedule, so that's another wrench.
We've now had other complications. We use a particular program at my job which is specific to our business, or type of business; it's on all of our workstations. Several of us share two computers, though during the day one of them, I'll call it A, is primarily what I use. It has Outlook on it, which I use for email (others either have their own email on their own workstations, like the big bosses, or they use personal email; it's pretty much just me and occasionally one other person who uses the general work account). It's also where I store any Word documents and things of that nature. The other one, B, is the secondary one; it is older, and slower, and just a pain. It's also finicky at times and, for example, doesn't always like to print. It's the one we go to when A is already in use.
Ever since Wednesday after I left, workstation A has decided it doesn't want to run the program. I came in Thursday morning to a note from my coworker saying it wasn't running, grrrr. Yes, he growled in the note. Sure enough, despite restarting the computer multiple times, and restarting the server (meaning, temporarily, *no one* could run the program), and running updates, and what have you, there is no using the program on A. Considering we have important information that I need to access via the program, that has made, say, answering people's emails kind of hard. I'm having to run back and forth between A, where I can send emails, and B, where I can access information, which is a pain--especially if someone else is there and using B. Then I can't access anything.
This morning, B decided to be a pain in the rear and not want to print anything. Well, okay, it chose to print, but took literally 10 minutes to do anything. A bit later, someone else tried again, and after another 10 minutes decided it wasn't actually going to print this time. It was taking so long, and the other person needed to go, that I said, copy down the particular code, take it to another workstation, and print it from there. No joke, he'd just finished printing it from the other one when B gave its error code. Such a pain. And, it's not like you could access the program on B while it was doing that; it essentially froze. I love watching what we've termed the death spiral as the cursor just spins and spins while it thinks about printing. So, now, I had to go to a *third* workstation, this one much farther away from A and B, if I wanted to print anything. That's not a hassle. At least, with it being a holiday weekend, things were on the quiet side. But this does not bode well for the near future, that's for sure. Things will pick back up come Tuesday.
The worst part was that, because the bosses were trying to fix A, they kept turning it off a couple times. This meant I couldn't do anything with email, even though I had a few things (including something time-consuming) I needed to get done. But then B would have the program shut off, meaning I couldn't do anything there. I got paid to stand around and look pretty today. It's one thing when it's not busy, but when I have piles of things to do, it's just super frustrating.
Right now we're into a busy period. That's all fine and dandy. I expect it, I anticipate it, it's okay. What I don't plan for is having computer issues. We know our computers are old. In fact, we've recently purchased fresh new-ish ones (they may be refurbished), but we've been too busy to install them. Also, someone who used to work for us who now is more of a consultant would need to set them up, and that has to be done on his schedule, so that's another wrench.
We've now had other complications. We use a particular program at my job which is specific to our business, or type of business; it's on all of our workstations. Several of us share two computers, though during the day one of them, I'll call it A, is primarily what I use. It has Outlook on it, which I use for email (others either have their own email on their own workstations, like the big bosses, or they use personal email; it's pretty much just me and occasionally one other person who uses the general work account). It's also where I store any Word documents and things of that nature. The other one, B, is the secondary one; it is older, and slower, and just a pain. It's also finicky at times and, for example, doesn't always like to print. It's the one we go to when A is already in use.
Ever since Wednesday after I left, workstation A has decided it doesn't want to run the program. I came in Thursday morning to a note from my coworker saying it wasn't running, grrrr. Yes, he growled in the note. Sure enough, despite restarting the computer multiple times, and restarting the server (meaning, temporarily, *no one* could run the program), and running updates, and what have you, there is no using the program on A. Considering we have important information that I need to access via the program, that has made, say, answering people's emails kind of hard. I'm having to run back and forth between A, where I can send emails, and B, where I can access information, which is a pain--especially if someone else is there and using B. Then I can't access anything.
This morning, B decided to be a pain in the rear and not want to print anything. Well, okay, it chose to print, but took literally 10 minutes to do anything. A bit later, someone else tried again, and after another 10 minutes decided it wasn't actually going to print this time. It was taking so long, and the other person needed to go, that I said, copy down the particular code, take it to another workstation, and print it from there. No joke, he'd just finished printing it from the other one when B gave its error code. Such a pain. And, it's not like you could access the program on B while it was doing that; it essentially froze. I love watching what we've termed the death spiral as the cursor just spins and spins while it thinks about printing. So, now, I had to go to a *third* workstation, this one much farther away from A and B, if I wanted to print anything. That's not a hassle. At least, with it being a holiday weekend, things were on the quiet side. But this does not bode well for the near future, that's for sure. Things will pick back up come Tuesday.
The worst part was that, because the bosses were trying to fix A, they kept turning it off a couple times. This meant I couldn't do anything with email, even though I had a few things (including something time-consuming) I needed to get done. But then B would have the program shut off, meaning I couldn't do anything there. I got paid to stand around and look pretty today. It's one thing when it's not busy, but when I have piles of things to do, it's just super frustrating.