What a week...I keep seeming to say that.
Well, last weekend sucked enormously. I can't quite put it into words, but it was a nightmare and a half.
We'd kicked a lot of production to RedVendor at Noon on Friday, so the afternoon was a little crazy just attending to a lot of little things that we didn't quite anticipate. Nothing major...just minor annoyances that we quickly resolved.
Saturday at 8:30, my pager went off. Fuck. We had an outage. Apparently, the entire connection between us and them were down. This was bad...real bad. At Noon, we were scheduled to start receiving files for our billing and invoicing cycle. We had to print like 150,000 pages and get the delivered to the Ivory Tower by Sunday afternoon. Not having a connection was not a good thing. Well, the morning went on and I had a lot of other shit to do. I was getting pages, calls on my cell and calls on the real phone. It was not shaping up to be a good day for your NoGoodDaddy.
But, I had errands to run. So, off to the Farmer's Market I went. I needed pork, squash and a 5lb writhing sack of crawfish. It was crawfish day after all, and I was fixin' to do some boilin'. Plus, we had The Irish coming in at 1:40.
More calls followed as JewelrySlut and Shmuppie went to the Y for swimming lessons. Still no connection and the witching hour was approaching. I had designated 3:00PM as the deadline for the backout plan. If we had problems, we had until 3:00 to kick the work back to NJ and still get it done on time. RedHead was freaking out big time and wanted to kick the work over early. I kept telling her that she paid me for moments like this and that she had to be confident in my abilities. I wanted the connection to get fixed, but it didn't look good.
So, 3:00 came and we killed the plan. We kicked it back to NJ and mobilized the operators up there to get the work done. Emails and calls kept flowing. The Irish seemingly enjoyed watching me field calls from 47 directions at once. It was a scene.
Then we ate and I nailed the crawfish but over cooked the pork. I was not happy. I was also exhausted. I don't think I spelt well.
Sunday was busy. More fallout from the day before and a full house. I was still exhausted. I think we went to the pool at some point. It was cold. Then, I tried to go to bed early but couldn't sleep.
4:45 Monday; wakeup time to get my flight. This week has been a mess and a half. I fly home tomorrow night and we still are nowhere near ready. Luckily we have another week of testing. However, I won't be here; I'll be at home. I know we'll make it by the deadline, but it's going to be a mess.
Plus, ReadHead is in town and it's all I can do to not kill her. She's fretting about the appearance of the production floor. She's fretting about the fonts on the reports. Me? I'm fretting because the FUCKING PRINTERS DON'T WORK! As we stand, I am the lead printer operator for RedVendor. I'd be more stressed if I either cared more or didn't know better.
One gets ones stripes in the world of Production Management when they know how to respond when the shit is fully in the fan. Trust me, it's shitty this week. But, this is what I do well, and I'm doing it very well. I have several new things to add to my resume after this week; Dude Who Sets UP Printers, among them.
I'm looking forward to getting home tomorrow night. Aside from the 2 obvious reasons, I have a few others that I won't discuss here at this time. Maybe in time, but not now.
All I know is that I want June to be over and for this all to be migrated. This is the biggest thing I've done in my career and it's been quite a ride. I've learned a lot of shit and proved a lot to myself. I really am good at what I do. And, hopefully soon, someone else will get to see just how good.
Well, it's about bedtime. Yes, it's 9:30, but I'm beat. Long day ahead of me tomorrow.