Pneumonochrome

So, I was planning to continue working as long as I could, through the end of my second year if possible, while I  attended Medical School.  One of the things orientation convinced me of, however, was that “as long as I could,” will be… maybe 3 weeks.  There’s just too much to do to make sure I do well in medical school, and stay involved enough that I’ll be able to get the residency I want in 4 years.  If I tried to work, too, I’d never see my family at all, and I’d prefer not to abandon them until residency forces me to.

So now I’m facing the prospect of knowing, for the first time in 10 years, that I’m going to be unemployed, and living on a fixed income for a while.  It’s a little stressful looking at the money my loans provide and comparing it with the cost of attendance (health insurance, tuition, books, rent, food, gas, etc…), and not knowing how I’m going to make the latter number be smaller than the former.

It’s hard for me, having been so independent financially for so long, to know that I’m going to be confined to a very small income, and that there’s no chance of increasing it.  I’m supposed to provide for my family, and provide well enough that they have at least a somewhat comfortable life.  I don’t know how to do that in my new circumstances, though.  I have no idea.

It’s terrifying me today, and I’m hoping that terror won’t show when I stand in front of a lot of people, receive my first white coat, and recite the Oath of Hippocrites today.  I hope I don’t suddenly lose it, under the weight of it all, and puke all over whoever is standing in front of me.  I guess it’s a good thing they forgot to schedule us time for lunch, because my stomach is currently almost empty from breakfast, and it’s starting to wrestle with my intestines.  I’m hoping they don’t get carried away and force my esophagus and pharynx into the mix, because they don’t like wrestling.  It always turns out bad for them, and they are getting a bit nervous.

So, we all have bad experiences with services we use from time to time, and often we are perfectly justified in being angry about those bad experiences.  I’m not arguing with this.  However, it is always in one’s best interest to try not to put the person to whom you are complaining on the defensive before you’ve had a chance to discuss the problem.

I manage some computer labs, and occasionally things go wrong and patrons are justifiably and understandably upset about it.  This happened recently at my lab and the patron was given my home phone number.  He called and left a message that began with him introducing himself and telling me that he was “really pissed that” and then stated the problem he was having with the labs at the time.

Now, this problem was the fault of my staff.  They messed up.  This guy is understandably upset.  I don’t blame him.  But by taking that tone with me before I ever actually get to talk to him about things, he makes me very unexcited to talk to him when I actually catch him at the number he left for me.  What a difference it would have made if he’d said something more along the lines of: “I’m upset that this happened and would like to talk to you about it.”  Just a simple change in wording makes the message no less clear, but much less challenging.

Tip for anyone about to call someone for customer service concerns:  It’s in your best interest to be cordial to the people you talk to, at least until they have personally given you a reason not to be.

So, I’m apparently in a really bad mood today. I was just unbelievably rude to someone here at work.

I have a machine that I had to put out of order yesterday because it needed to have it’s software system rebuilt (we call it re-rolling the machine). When I rerolled it, some of the programs that needed to run were missing, so I placed it out of order because the person who manages the software for the machine had gone home. I sent him an email and knew that when I got in this morning I’d need to restart the process.

So I got here today, grabbed what I needed to get the machine rolling again, walked out there and the Out of Order sign I’d placed on the machine was no longer on the monitor, but sitting under the keyboard and someone was sitting there using the computer to surf the web. This is a problem because the part that had broken was the part that sets up the authentication mechanism for the computer, so the user was using the machine anonymously, with administrator privileges.

I walked up to her and asked, “Was this Out of Order sign here when you sat down at this machine?”

“Yes…”

“Okay, well… ‘Out of Order’ usually means ‘Don’t use the computer’.”

“…”

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on this machine before it’s ready to be used. You can use any of the other machines in the lab, as long as they don’t have Out of Order signs.”

“… Okay…. sorry.”

“That’s fine.” And I waited for her to get up, sat down and started working on the machine. Then my brain finally processed the conversation I just had with this girl, and said to me, “You know Dave, you were about as rude as it is possible to be to that poor girl. The sign looks like it fell off on its own, she probably didn’t even notice it until you pointed it out, and you just made her feel about as big as a mouse. You’re kind of a jerk.”

I turned around to apologize to her, because I really didn’t mean to be that awful, but she was gone already, and now I feel completely terrible about it. I’m sitting in my office trying to work on projects and can’t concentrate on them, because I keep thinking about how awful I was to the poor girl.

I’m a jerk.

We had some excitement here in at work last week. On Thursday I was sitting in my office trying to set up a server when suddenly the server stopped responding. I was a bit worried, because I hadn’t done anything that could have caused it to hang up, so I tried to reach it another way and realized that I’d lost my network connectivity altogether. Right about then I got a knock on my office door and one of my employees said, “Um… there’s water pouring out of the server room…”

What?!

Sure enough, when I checked, there was about a quarter of an inch of water on the floor outside the server room and it was quickly spreading. All of our network equipment is in that room, so I quickly opened the door and found that it was raining
(rain-forest raining, you know where it’s so humid the water just seems to be forming into droplets out of the air around you) down directly on the rack that ouses our equipment. I ran in there, jumping as I grabbed the power cords to ensure that I didn’t electrocute myself, getting drenched the whole time, and managed to get the power cut off to all of our equipment, and then had to go kick about a hundred students out of the lab, telling them that they wouldn’t be able to print, access email, or really anything else. Some had no way of saving what they were working on, so I started scrounging up floppy disks to help them out.

Before we found out what had caused the indoor monsoon, the networking guys got here and started pulling out the equipment, and water poured out of every single thing they took off the rack. We pulled them all into my office and opened them up to let them dry out, and started trying to figure out what was going on.

Turns out a custodian had broken a pipe directly over our server room while cleaning, and instead of telling someone about it, he decided to hold on to it for 10 minutes and see if he could somehow stop the water with his bare hands (Typing that makes me think of that song, “Jackie-chan-jackie-chan-jackie-jackie-chan-chan….” for some reason). That ten minutes allowed the water to pool in the ceiling above our server room and start leaking down through it. Had the dude told someone immediately, we’d probably have been able to cover our equipment and get it shut down and only been out of commission for a couple of hours.

As it was, the lab was out of commission for the rest of the day about 8 hours) waiting for the drenched equipment to dry out enough for us to test it. Once that had happened we started firing things up and out of 4 switches ($1000-$1500 each), 1 UPS ($3000) 1 router ($2500) and 1 server ($2500), we only lost two switches. Everything else fired up again. We decided to let the room air out and dehumidify over night, and got everything put back in and all 120 computers reconnected by about noon the next day.

This was in one of the most used computer labs on campus, and my staff were spending all their time turning people away and explaining why the computers didn’t work. It was quite the ordeal, though I can *almost* laugh about it now.

I had this meeting today with a bunch of people I’ve worked with on projects before. We’ve got a fairly large renovation project we’re starting, and had to meet with the architect and contracters to give them an idea of what we need done so they can give us a bid. Because people in the department I work for still don’t think I’m capable of handling things myself, there were some other people from my department, who really don’t have much to do with this project, there to make sure I didn’t screw anything up, or act out in anyway. One of these people we’ll call Janice. I’ve worked with Janice quite extensively before. In fact, I used to work for her, well, for someone who worked for her, but she was involved enough in my supervisor’s job that I might as well have worked directly for her. The point is, she knows me quite well.

Anyway, she hasn’t seen me since I’ve grown my beard, and I was wearing this corduroy hat that I haven’t ever worn to work before, so she walks in, sits down, looks around and then turns to me and says, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met, I’m Janice with such-and-such department…” All I could do for a moment was sit there in stunned silence. I’ve worked with this woman for more than 5 years now, and she had no idea who I was. After a moment, I responded with, “Hi! I’m David, I manage these facilities for such-and-such department.” Now it was her turn to look stunned. She stared at me for a few seconds, mouth hanging open, eyes wide, and then said, “David! I’m so sorry, I didn’t recognize you with the beard and the hat, you look so different.”

I suppose I could have milked the situation, but I’ve been chuckling about it ever since as it is, and knew I would be, so I let it slide without any further discussion, but boy was that funny. I ought to grow a beard more often.