The light at the end - Train Lights? - yep, that would be an end

[trickykitty]

The past three weeks have been busier than hell due to a major systems changeover at work. We went live in a system that completely replaced our call booking/tracking, dispatch and invoicing systems, but there was ZERO data in the table files when we went live, and little training for everyone. I probably had the most training in the system between our two offices, so I took it upon myself to write out How To documents for a lot of crap. Of course, most people don't learn like I do by reading, so even though there was quite a lot of material there, I still got asked 10,000 questions about things I'd already typed up. The entire first couple of days was spent hovering over my two less-computer-literate co-workers walking them through every step of everything, while simultaneously asking the support people questions myself and freaking out over how we were supposed to be able to process invoices and things without data in the system. I was prepared to spend a week without sleep entering tables so we could still function as a company and get paid on the next payroll. Luckily, I chose to drive over to the Dallas shop a couple days in and sit with our A/P person and my equivalent cohort so that we could figure some things out on processing without having email and phones in our way. During that time, I also took over talking with the IT specialist working on getting at least a couple of our required table data files transferred over, so by the end of the day I was feeling at least a bit more accomplished.

Then, our phones and internet kept going dead for the next whole week or so. On top of that, we switched email carriers which caused a few days of havoc, and is still causing some problems when people trash emails in the IMAP that other people need to read but then have no clue that the email ever existed.

Out front of the building I saw a power line arching and trying to catch fire - at 2:30am on Halloween. Yep, that's what I did after trick-or-treating with the boys - I went back to work. As I was walking to my car I heard a buzzing noise and thought it was the next door neighbor's street sign, until I saw the pretty flashing lights on the pole next to it. Called 911 and waited about 20 min for the firemen to show up, but by then it had stopped being a pest. I guess they checked it out and cleared it, because the next day at work was nothing electric pole related (although the phones were still going down constantly). About a week or so later, my co-worker comes into my office saying, "You've gotta come check this out." I instantly ask him if it's the power line, and sure enough it's acting up again. Cue 911 again. This time I notified the neighbors since 1)it was business hours and there were people there, and 2)they had a couple of cars parked just beneath that pole that I figured they might want to move. The firemen again arrive after the lightening show and flames had stopped, but they finally did what I think they should have done on Halloween which was to put in a call to the electric company. That guy arrived within the hour and could see the charred section right off the bat, and a coil needed to be replaced, but he was by himself and would need backup that wasn't available, so we had to sit tight until a work crew arrived, but luckily the whole thing was quick and over with without any further incidence.

Anyway, the lights stopped flickering, but still the phones kept dropping sporadically. A few more hair pulling days of that nonsense and we finally are back to having full technological ability again. Well, except me, because I have the slowest computer on the face of the planet that can't seem to handle more than a couple of programs being open at once, and the new system is all internet based, which is tasking the crap out of my virtual memory. I know this, because I actually got a warning from the system while I hear it's little motherboard get louder and louder and struggle with all the processing I need from it. I may be taking over the laptop at work and hooking it up to my current monitor and keyboard, just because it has a much better processor than my Little Ancient. I just worry about how to keep all my data in my email client, the fact that I can't stand the newer versions of MS Office with the ribbons crap (which I think is what's on that system), and all the other random hassle it's going to take to get swapped over.

I had to let go of a staff person, and without replacing him we're now down to three staff instead of four. There's no longer anyone in our shop on weekends, which means my phone rings a lot more when techs need in to the building to get something. It's only been two weekends, but already I'm tired of it. My boss is under the impression that we should only be a two person office, because we have half the number of techs than the Dallas office. Except he NEVER hires anyone to be in our office, and instead hires people that live about half way between the two but then bases those techs out of Dallas instead of Fort Worth. Not to mention, we tend to have to call Dallas for additional tech almost daily because we don't have the number of techs we need to get to all of our calls. He also has a new found fondness for the phrase, "Don't tell me about the labor, just show me the baby." So when he asks me what I do all day long (because he's never in my office to see what I do all day long), it's hard to explain to him that what I do all day long is the labor required to produce said baby, but he doesn't want to hear about the labor. He actually said that our call volume has gone down, so there shouldn't be that many people in our office. He forgets that our sales are still going up significantly, and that equates to an exponential increase in back-end workload. I could close 20 jobs where techs went out to calls and cabled sewer lines and did nothing else in probably about 20min flat without ever having to do any other work. But one tech sells one $30k job, and now I'm pulling labor POs and permits, and driving to the bank every other day for 1-2 weeks, and dealing with being on hold for the city if not having to drive out to the city, and processing financing paperwork, and explaining financing for the umpteenth time to my tech so that he can explain it to the customer, and fixing errors when my office staff make them while assigning invoices and POs, the invoice now takes 30+ minutes to process, and that's assuming the tech turned everything in he was supposed to, which they usually don't, so then I'm on the phone with a vendor or maybe I was on the phone with the vendor and our A/P person earlier because the tech tried to buy something and the vendor says we're overdrawn on the billing account or they can't find us in the system, and the list goes on and on and on. For every big job a tech sells, my work load is easily multiplied by 10. Bossman has another favorite phrase, "I don't need activity. I need productivity." Apparently this comes from that Habits of Highly Successful People series or something. He doesn't understand that productivity is a lot like that 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration trope. It requires 90% activity behind the scenes (the Labor) in order to produce the shiny, squishy, pruny baby.

Last night I stayed at work after we closed to finally figure out how to do our last major report using the new system. It's been plaguing me since the middle of last week. It took a while to realize how we processed it before was based on the kinds of reports we could get out of the previous database system and how things were processed in that system. I had to completely rethink what exactly it was that we needed to create the report as if from scratch and then go from there figuring out which reports in the new system would give me the most data with the fewest number of reports to print. Once I got that all figured out last night, it was pretty late, but I FINALLY felt like I was starting to see the end of this LONG fucking tunnel.

In other news, I bought a 3" gel foam mattress topper for my bed (OMG that thing is heavy), and I finally got the bed sheets sorted this past weekend so that I can use the thing. So far, I've still been so stressed over work stuff that I've only sort of gotten a good night's sleep. I'm undecided about how this is helping for my back. I really need a new bed, but I don't have the money for that at the moment. Besides, my goal was to wait until I had a house to buy a new king-sized bed, and then I could keep this one for the spare bedroom. There's nothing wrong with it - it's just too soft for my back now and/or it's lost a lot of the spring in the middle springs to provide the level of support I need. As far as spare beds go, it's still absolutely fine. Maybe by the end of this week I'll have gotten back into a normal work and sleep schedule again, and then I'll have a much better idea of how well the gel foam topper is working for me.