Just another typical Monday

I decided to go to work this morning, I woke up with some breathing problems, and didn't necessarily want to go in, but I figured there were already things piling up and I needed to get some stuff do, so I went in.

The first person who came in wanted to know how to trace a network connection. My response was that if he had shown up for the training class I did 4 times in the last 2 years, he would have known. (His team was the one who begged me to do it the 4th time, and promised they would show up, only 2 made their way to the class.) The guy next to me ended up helping him with his problem.

Knee deep in fixing stuff, someone else barged in demanding that I look at her problem immediately.

Background: We have been asking her to move her application from an older machine to a newer one for a few months. She finally got around to looking at it 2 weeks ago, and went (basically) nuts demanding an extra machine to make the move happen. We simply did not have another machine to use. The MTC surplused a machine a few weeks ago, I found it picking through the surplus warehouse salvaging ethernet cards out of some servers for another server move that needed to happen.

Anyway, I appropriated (5 finger discount) the "new" (old) machine, and started working on it. This lady heard about it and was in my office every 2 hours asking if it was done. Finally, Monday afternoon, she sent an email asking when it would be done, I explained the work left and told her she would have to be patient. Her response was that "they would just have to make do." I bent over backwords and spent a lot of time between Monday, Monday evening, and all day Tuesday to get the machine done. An email was sent back saying it was ready, she came in once to get a password reset, and I didn't hear anything more until today. (6 days later) Suddenly, it's an emergency for her again, but I know for a fact that she didn't log into the machine between Tuesday and today. (I had been checking last week to see, because I hadn't heard anything.)

Well, not so much as a thank you for the work, and their impatience at the beginning of last week obviously was just noise. Having other work to do today, and not breathing well, I was not in the mood to deal with her. (Hardware failure on one machine, web servers acting funny after a change last week, HW team needing help with something, that kind of normal Monday activity.) She started getting belligerent, and I got really belligerent. She left upset, I immediately got over it and got back to work.

Well, I'm sure she's still mad. People have said that she's never talking to me again. (She said that 8 years ago, when I refused to go into the old Data Center on Saturday night and all day Sunday just to load tapes for her, way outside our normal operating procedure at the time.)

I don't particularly care today. I'm pretty tired of people who make mountains out of molehills. She has some sort of application problem, I don't plan to do a whole lot about it in the next couple of days. In fact, if I'm not breathing very well, I don't plan to really go into work at all at this point. Maybe I can get the guys in the office to be mysterious about my whereabouts and start some rumors...

Anyway, I should probably be a nicer person, but I don't feel like it right now.