What a Day
Today was the first day of classes at the university where I work in IT support. That means campus was full of people who needed help in a variety of ways. The second anyone ventured outside of their office, they's be accosted by an innocent freshman or newly hired professor who needed directions to some other building. In the technology world, there dozens of people who a) forgot their password b) did not want to click the self-service link for forgotten passwords. Later on in the year, I'll make them use the self-service link but today there was no time to convince these neo-adults to take the responsible route out of their self-created problems. I just reset their password for them and moved along to the next person. Some people would listen to the directions on what to do next and say "Thank you" but more than a few insisted on having me stay on the phone with them until they finally managed to get logged in. After four hours of this I was ready for lunch, or so I thought, but my lunch turned out to be inedible after spending a weekend in a not-cold-enough refrigerator. No worries, the boss said he was going to get us pizza for having to slave through the Day One crush. Except, when he came back to the office, he was empty handed, pleading forgetfulness. I had returned to the office 45 minutes early for the pizza that didn't happen and ended up working through it all, off the clock and unpaid because I felt guilty just sitting there while the rest of the people on my team were dealing with fires.
So, hungry and irritated, I started the afternoon trying to avoid phone calls from a whiny math professor who thought that fixing a paper jam in her ink jet printer was the most important thing I had to do today. Finally, I escaped the office to go help the nice guy in the veteran's affairs office who tells funny stories, gives me doughnuts and never rushes me. There, I took a solid hour of slow, methodical, step by step actions to install one printer and one scanner. I got my doughnut and made my way back to the office. I messaged my wife something to the effect of "If today were my first day, there would be no second day." The person whose actual job it is to answer the phone (because it is not mine) kept periodically getting up from her desk and walking around, causing me to continue to take phone calls right up until quitting time.
One of those phone calls was from my dentist office, telling me of a mistake in my last bill that means I owe them an extra $1,000. I did not see this coming. Because we were traveling this weekend, we did not have a chance to do the weekly shopping, meaning that instead of getting off work to come home and relax, we had to go to the supermarket at the busiest time of the day.
Finally, we are got home, and I got something to eat. I did not get to watch an hour of TV while cuddling my wife as is my habit because she didn't have time to finish her workout this morning and still needed to do some hill-climbing training in preparation for a 40-mile mountain ultra-marathon coming up in a couple of weeks. I ended up on the couch with my laptop and an attitude with three blog posts to write, this being the last one. When I am done with this, I'll have a snack and go to bed to face a day that in many ways will be like the one I just had, only slightly less so, I hope.
To my credit, I did not do anything today for which I will have to apologize tomorrow. I managed to help quite a few people who I could tell were in genuine distress. This is my 25th "first day of school" in IT support, so I was surprised by nothing that happened. I have been to this rodeo before. I just forget how much it sucks sometimes. I'm going to read a few blogs on my iPad as I nod off to sleep. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.
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