Miscellany - 19 April 2002

Today is the anniversary of my Granpa's death. How do I remember? It was kind of memorable. It was spring break my senior year in high school. My dad and I had driven from South Bend Indiana to Connecticut on the 18th after driving out to Wisconsin on to attend the prospective open house. We got home at 10pm, early the next afternoon my dad called us all into the living room and broke the news. The next morning we set off for Ohio. It was devestating, especially since I was very close to my grandpa.

My grandpa was the first family member I had lost. I mean both my mother's parents were dead, but they both died before I was born, so I never knew them. I also remember that it wasn't until October when I was away at college that the loss and what it meant fully sank in. I'm really good about surpressing emotions that I don't want to deal with.

Why is all this coming up? My grandma is 93 and the reports point to her wearing down. She's stubborn enough that she won't go until she's good an ready, but she's not her old self either. One would think that being older, I'd be better equipped to deal with at least the idea of losing a grandparent, but I'm not.

So... on a completely different note, if I were a customer and I called for help on a problem or issue, I wouldn't ignore the person who called back for 3 weeks when they called every day and then scream angrily in their voice mail when I finally got around to it, but then, I'm mostly sane and my customers aren't necessarily.

Going to be a fun weekend. We have a customer who has an almost entirely custom system doing an update of their software today and just found out an hour ago that they are expecting someone here to be here ALL DAY tomorrow while they do their testing of their system.

Whether or not this is what Software Engineering agreed to (and we don't know what they agreed to because NO ONE who was involved with this is reachable, in fact, one of them is in Florida), we in Tech Support are now stuck having to deal with it. So the person who volunteered to do their update after being told the testing would be done on Monday, will be in until about 11 to work on it and I, who have the beeper, am expected to make myself available and fix all the problems that happen for the rest of the day and into the night and on Sunday and all night Sunday if need be. Why? Because I have the beeper. Will I be compensated for my time? No. Why? It's not a beeper call, so no bonus there and I'm not eligible for overtime.

Screwed over by Software Engineering again. I'm so sick and tired of cleaning up their messes and taking the heat for them. Just once I'd like to see them own a problem.

Grrrrrrr

Think happy thoughts....Ok.. I'm blanking here...Ok... maybe... non-violent thoughts... umm.... ok... this is beginning to be troubling. I think I'll go find the picture of my cat & look at those for a while.