The Curse of Toosday

It's been a really odd week. I don't think one thing has gone as expected all week. I'm not talking about your normal, everyday unexpected events, I'm talking about things I've done several times that have a predictable outcome that didn't go as expected. And it all started Tuesday.

We were supposed to do a software conversion at one of the clinics on Tuesday. The normal course of events has been to download the dataset for the next clinic and send it to the vendor for conversion first thing in the morning. We are usually out the door by 8:30, 9:00 at the latest. Nope, not today. For some reason, downloading the dataset from clinic "b" took an inordinately long time and we didn't get out the door until 9:30-9:45. Clinic "b" is only about 1/4 mile away. The signal shouldn't have had to traverse that many contact points and the download should have been pretty quick. It would have been quicker, literally, to walk over there and grab it locally.

We made it to clinic "a" about 11:00 am. Carl was walking around in a technology suppression bubble and I, apparently, was walking around in an intelligence suppression bubble. Carl was working on getting a new router installed, fixing some network wiring and getting wireless setup properly... nope. The router install went fine, the wiring wasn't a huge issue but he never did quite get that wireless working... although, I had zero problems with my wireless signal.

As for me, I kept forgetting what I was doing. I would be working on terminal 1, decide I needed to do something on terminal 2 (3 feet away), roll my chair over and forget why I was there. At one point, my brain just shut down. I was sitting at a workstation concentrating on what I was doing, thinking about my next steps, going over what I had already done... you know, normal task-based thinking... when all of a sudden all thought just ceased. I suddenly, and without reason, went into mental pause mode. The two halves of my brain just stopped, looked at each other and said, "It's dark in here and we might die." I'm truly surprised I could still remember who I was, where I was and why I was there.

Wednesday, I started to rebuild a server. This is something I've done about a half a dozen times recently. The install stopped halfway through and, after restarting it, I was eventually prompted to forego the installation of a component that I normally have to uninstall later. Then, the drive mappings went all wiggy... it was just... odd.

Thursday wasn't too bad. I spent most of the day finishing up the server rebuild and waiting for contact from vendors.

On Friday, Carl and I were supposed to do the last software conversion at the local clinic. At the last minute, Carl ended up having to go to Oklahoma City to straighten something out with the call director that is connected to our toll-free number. I ended up doing the conversion on my own. I also ended up giving myself two minor injuries within twenty minutes of my arrival. The first injury was as I was unloading. The 1.5" thick manual for the new software slid out of the box. When I tried to catch it - reflex - the corner of the binding caught my right palm and scraped a bit of skin off. Nothing serious but it still itches. Then, as I was scouting out where we wanted to move the network router, I smacked my head on the top of the 4' high access door.

It took me until lunch time to finally finish with the networking changes and I figured out I wouldn't be able to move any of it (it's currently in the ceiling on the first level - we wanted to move it into an attic space on the second floor that holds some other wiring). I decided that, rather than diving into the conversion, I needed a break and took lunch. As it was, it took me until about 5:15 to get the conversion itself done - all the while trying to finalize the purchase of a new phone system - and I still have some loose ends to tie up Monday afternoon.

Man, the beer I had with dinner on Friday tasted SO good!

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I'll have to tell you about our new phone system sometime in the near future. It was a very interesting process in deciding. The technology we went with is relatively young (but stable) and there isn't a whole lot of comparative information available and most that is available is not up-to-date. Fun challenge.