Week Of Stupid

This has been a week of stupid. It started with very few hours of sleep after spending all day Sunday taking the kids to see their first Cubs game at Wrigley. That was an experience. One I will not be reliving soon. After I drop the kids off at daycare at O' Dark Early I drive as fast as the county police will let me to get my first cup of nectar from the gods. One of the gas stations I pass on my way to the expressway sells great coffee. Yes, it is gas station coffee; but they use only Kona beans. And well, I live in the middle of a corn field so what can I expect. It is either gas station coffee or Starbucks which I refuse to think of as real coffee.


Wednesday morning I was so tired from having an up and down night with the kids that I drove right past the gas station and was almost 2 miles down the road before I realized it. Since I was at the ramp that would take me to my second private hell I thought really hard about just getting coffee at the Dunkin Doughnuts that is right off the expressway by work. It meant I would have to wait another hour before I could have a sip of my life's blood though. While waiting for the light to change I looked down and saw I wouldn't have enough gas to get to work and I was already running late so stopping twice was out of the question. I backtracked to my gas station, filled up the van and got the copious amounts of coffee that it takes to keep me and two of my co-workers from killing each other and went on to work. The next morning at the said gas station again getting coffee, the lady who is responsible for keeping me in coffee tells me that she forgot to charge me for the gas yesterday when she rang up my coffee. I looked at her blankly for a moment and said okay I will pay today. This is a situation that makes me glad I go to the same gas station everyday; it really would have upset me to find out that my friends at the county police station were looking for me because I had driven away without paying for the gas.

Last month at work we installed a new software to bring my department out of the dark ages and it was my job to train everyone. This required me to work an average of 50 hours a week since the beginning of the year and not take any vacation time. This week everyone in the department seems to have forgotten everything they learned and just kept asking the same stupid questions over and over again. Not just about the new system, but also about how to do their jobs. Like they haven't been working for the company 10 years or so longer then I have.

The stupidness of this week reached new heights on Friday though. Both of my children were awake when I put them in the car to take them to daycare so I was running late. Again. While putting Angel Cake's seatbelt on I mentioned that it was their last day at daycare since this is how they catagorize the days of the week. There are daycare days and family days. After my exclamation, Angel Cakes looked up at me and said, 'Is that a good thing?' My heart broke a little since I knew I would once again be working this Saturday to do the work I neglected all week because I had to hold my co-works hands.

Right after we started on the new system we realized that about 100 of our customers were converted incorrectly. It is an internal problem that would take almost as many man hours to fix. Since it is transparent to the customer we opted for an ongoing work around solution that we found instead. At about 10:30 my supervisor who helped design the new system had the brain fart of all brain farts. One of my coworkers had a question about one of the customers affected by the problem and she flipped! I can't attest to what she thought was going on with the customer, but she swore that the problem was a new problem she knew nothing about and we would have to put in all the man hours to fix it because the customers are seeing the incorrect information. She immediately starts e-mailing everyone up and down the company ladder about the problem.

No matter how many times both IT and I tried to explain that this was the same problem, the customers are not aware, and that it was okay, she refused to listen. It got to the point I was jumping up and down in the aisle between our desks, because that was going to make her see reason right? I was just at that point. We were arguing so much we scared a couple of our co-workers who promptly left the department. Almost two hours later she finally looks at me and asks, 'Am I being stupid?' I just looked at her for a minute and nearly shouted 'Yes' in relief. Her crazy moment was over and it was time for lunch.