Tag Archives: better than digging a ditch

working late

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I put in 72 hours so far this week in order to get a massive project at work off the ground. I wasn’t running the project and I wasn’t deploying any changes, but somehow I found myself right in the middle of it. I’ve still got some items to follow up on this weekend and plenty of work to get done Monday morning, but all I want to do right now is relax. I might buy groceries and cook dinner. I haven’t seen Lauren in a few days because of my crazy work schedule (I was in the office until 4 AM last night). I’m looking forward to our date tonight, because I know we will probably play some Lego: Harry Potter on the Xbox 360 and, if for no other reason, I know she won’t ask me for a last minute emergency firewall change.

Covering a collegue’s workload

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This last week, the gal who sits next to me at work has been out on leave. We have different skill sets, but work on most of the same projects so we share a good knowledge base about the software we configure and support. So in her absence I’ve been picking up tickets assigned to her (that is to say the support desk is just assigning them directly to me) and trying to stay afloat. I’ve never been busier. She is out next week as well.

Tips:

  • Go heads down. Block off time on the calendar so people think you are in a meeting. Find a way to keep people from interrupting you. Don’t look at email. Don’t let yourself get distracted. Do this for about an hour a couple times a day.
  • Discern the difference between urgent and important. If something comes up that is both, drop what you are doing and take care of it.
  • Keep you boss well informed of all the little things you are putting off doing (since you don’t have the time), lest one of them blow up in your face. I’ve been told on several occasions that there’s no such thing as bad news, just surprise news.
  • Ask for help. There are people at work with years of expertise beyond me. There are also people at work who are just starting to out. If there is a task that might take me 2 hours to develop a fix, but someone else might already know a good solution and it take him 15 minutes, ask for help. If I can document a solution or at least the next steps in 15 minutes, rather than spend 2 hours working with a client, there are people at work looking for an opportunity to learn some of this stuff. I know I can ask for help and my teammates will come through.

I’m contemplating getting out my laptop and working some this weekend. I have an ominous feeling that Monday will not be kind. But right now, I must go play some video games. It’s been a cruel week.

30-Minute Meals [and by "Meals" I mean SQL Queries]

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It was an unexpected call and it carved up a 45 minute divot in my afternoon.

On a monthly basis I will get an email from Emily [client reporting] and one from Amy [client billing] for reports out of the Point of Sale system. I could probably set them up with access to the POS app, but considering how finicky it can be, I’d rather just run the reports myself than commit to supporting it on more workstations than I have to.

So I get this call from Amy in Accounting because the cash logs from the store don’t match the bank statements and would it be possible to run that monthly report again. But maybe this time, can I run it individually for each day in January. And can she get it today. Sure, but not without some sarcasm. I told her I’d be happy to do it, but she’s going to owe me a steak dinner. She counter-offered with a cupcake. Turns out someone upstairs brought in a whole bunch of cupcakes and nobody was eating them. I demanded she personally deliver it. She said she didn’t know where I sit. Just go downstairs and walk around until you find someone who looks like me who is expecting to see someone who looks like you holding a cupcake.

The daily report for January 2nd wasn’t helpful at all, so it’s time to dig into the SQL database for a little TRANS JOIN SALE action. I told her I would have to dig into the backend. She giggled. Over the next 5 minutes I was grunting at my computer while trying to find what transaction types were for credit cards. She asked if my computer was being slow or if I just didn’t know what I was doing. So I took a screenshot of SSMS screen with the TRANS table open and sent it to her. Stunned silence. Amy, I’ll call you back. The next 30 minutes was putting together the query and prettying up the results. Probably the most gratifying part of my day. 6 months ago, I would have had the same reaction as Amy: stunned silence. I wouldn’t have had a clue what I was looking at and would have been more than a little intimidated. But today I made it look easy. Feels good.

I never did get that cupcake. But I saved the code. I named it “how-to-get-amy-from-accounting-off-your-back.sql”