A Day from Hell

Today was a crummy day at the ol' salt mine. Late yesterday, a server processor quit working. That server was a single processor box that is fairly old.

When we bought it, we were told, "oh, it's just a file server; so only put a single processor in. It doesn't need hot swappable parts, because it's not critical and we need to save money."

Famous last words.

Well a project that was due today depended on that server, and it sure became important to the person doing the project yesterday.

Anyway, a person on the team worked into the night trying to get the computer running, but found the doa processor. He called and located a company that could overnight the part. BUT, we have to get approval from 2 different departments for emergency purchases and they weren't there that late at night to give the approval.

The order had to wait until today; never mind the poor user that needed their files.

So today, we started the process to buy the part. We filled out forms to make the purchase. Got them signed by our director, logged in by the secretary and walked down to the purchasing officer, who, as luck would have it, was offsite for the day.

The request went to the desk of a lower level purchasing agent, who called to say the vendor had to have a credit check before we could buy from them. That credit check would require an additional 24 hours.

I Googled the part number & found another vendor, Amazon. Now, it was an Amazon affiliate, but the check would go to Amazon. I gave this information to the purchasing peon along with 10 pages of additional vendors. They found one to their liking and the purchase process was back on.

It went to our financial department next who moved heaven & earth to get the order processed. It was logged into another computer system and the money was allocated for the purchase. Next, it went back to our purchasing office for the signature of the director who, remember the director? Was offsite.

I took the piece of paper, hopped in my car & started driving; right after the purchasing peon told me, they had to fax it by 2:00 PM for the vendor to get it to fedex for delivery today. Also, I had no idea where I was going.

I plugged the address into my smart phone & with fingers crossed, started heading across town.

I got lost!

I knew I was in trouble when the mapping app started taking me on winding back roads through a warehouse district in the, well I'll say it, the BAD part of town.

But through shear determination, I finally found the place, It was a warehouse that looked like the perfect crime scene location from CSI.

I rushed in; took a while to locate the purchasing director; got a signature. 15 minutes until 2:00 for a 30 minute drive back to the office is the lights worked in my favor.

Abandoning the mapping software, I took another route back to the office. I was guessing that there had to be a more direct route since I had been near that part of town on bike rides.

I was right and got back to the office in 20 minutes only to find that someone had taken my parking space in assigned parking. I took a visitor's space, put my parking id on the dash, informed security that I was in visitor's lot & there was an asshole in my space. There referred me to the guy that writes the tickets, saying "If you don't tell him, you might get towed."

I found him; reported the issue. In his most official way, he grabbed his ticket book saying "I'll take care of this."

I didn't offer my car keys, so I figured it wouldn't include moving my car.

So next I was off to the purchasing office... in the next building...

I was 5 minutes late, but I'm keeping fingers crossed that the part will be there tomorrow.