“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 809 (Friday) – issues and isolation

Today, I was the only person on the entire floor of the building in which I work. The space is probably larger than my house, and it was mostly deathly quiet, except for some random weird building noises which made it a little spooky. I could have stayed home and had the same sense of punishing solitary confinement without the driving and parking except, I couldn’t, because, rules and stuff.

There I sat, alone all day except for a brief time when one of the guys from facilities arrived in response to my service ticket about a broken shelf. While facilities was in the suite, a complete and total stranger came off the elevator. This was surprising, because elevator access requires a security pass, and thank goodness the guy from facilities was still there, because there is a very good chance I might have had a complete heart attack when a total stranger wandered into the deadly quiet suite while I was there alone. 

I have no idea who put the man in the elevator, swiped an access card, and let him ride up alone instead of escorting him, but it's probably a good thing I was rattling around in the office after all. And thank goodness for the facilities guru who was still in the suite after fixing the shelf and knew who to call, because the printer repair man wasn’t even in the right building. For whatever reason, the department listed on the service order sent him to our building, but it turned out the printer was in a building in another state. I handle a lot of random stuff, but coordination of printer repair is not one of them. Facilities guy sorted out the printer situation and escorted the repair guy out of the suite.

Sad sandwich at the desk.

The not-my-department’s-printer-repair surprise visit came in the midst of a maximum frustration situation of waiting for proofs related to account statements that should have been approved days ago, but the demon vendor who shall not be named pulled the wrong date for the review file when they finally got to it on Wednesday after two weeks and several follow-up emails from me. Today at 2:30, a new file was received and reviewed after another email follow-up. Nearly all of the 60+ account product types appeared as expected, but there was one problem affecting one specific account type. It's a good thing I carried in my lunch of a sad little sandwich, because there was not a moment to think about or fetch food all day.

At 4:00, after yet another follow-up email, the vendor rep called (because unlike the vendor, our phone numbers are included in our email footers, making a phone call possible). He said he was still sorting out the problem, with just one hour left for me to be able to receive, review, and approve the statements before heading out for a week. Just one tiny problem, there was still no content to review. 

Replacement beverage.

The rep determined the issue involved another department at the same vendor doing a server migration and some mumbo jumbo about the new server not recognizing special characters in product names and as a result, not pulling the account type to receive the message on the account statements in our sample. Perhaps ironically, the message is about the upcoming change to the product name which removes the special characters and is probably necessitated by the whole migration to the new server thing. The name change isn't even scheduled until August.

Basically, much of the day was a total shit show for both me and the rep sitting in his office far away in Georgia and it won’t even be resolved until next week. That required emails to team mates to fill them in about the situation, because I won't be in the office to complete the task.

At home, the cursed day continued when I knocked over a very large, very full glass of a cool, refreshing adult beverage that was on the end table and sent liquid flying all over the bottom of the bookcase, under the couch, basically everywhere in that entire corner of the living room. It was replaced with a cool refreshing glass of ice water. 

Then I realized that during the entire afternoon spent dealing with the demonic vendor, I forgot to set my out of office auto responder for next week. Now I need to remember to log in to get take care of that. Maybe tomorrow. Today has seen enough crap already.