Another day, another dollar

I was just looking at this neighborhoods thing and was "laughing" because what I think is probably my neighborhood has a rape rate that's like 200% higher than the US average. Sweet! I knew I always felt creepy walking around after dark alone.

Work was, as always, interesting today. I was busier than hell and at the end of the day DeAndre goes "has it been this slow all week?" I sort of yelled/laughed. He heard that our fax machine was broken and so he went over and tried to fix it. I think that it was probably under warranty and he voided the warranty. We have a guy at our company that is licensed to fix HP products and this was an HP fax machine. The worst part is, he's done it before (with a computer). It voided the warranty on that too. He got in trouble for that.

I was working on this thing all day and meanwhile a dude I may have mentioned before was IMing me all day for help. Here's more boring information on that. There's a type of project that is particularly difficult to do, and I am an expert in it for some reason (I guess opportunity). So I was working on doing one and the other guy was for some reason doing one. I was pissed off that he was doing one in the first place because he has no idea what he's doing, and I don't know why they are making him do it. So he's IMing me literally all flippin' day long with questions, so that I basically did it for him. I didn't QUITE do it for him, and for that reason it's still not working. He kept undoing things I told him to do. I would tell him "You CANNOT do this and you HAVE to do this" then he'd do it but it would throw an error so he'd put it back. I said multiple times, "we can work through this error", because I'm used to errors and every day I work through every possible type of error that happens on our system. For some reason errors scare him and he doesn't like to work through them, so he totally undoes everything that he did since the past order, so basically we never get anywhere. It's very frustrating. He has probably placed 30 test orders by now.

Another annoying thing is his boss is freaking out on him, and when I gave him the steps to resolve one of his errors she told him to ask my boss instead. Like my boss is going to say something different? Go ahead, try her! For one thing, she is going to agree with me, and for another thing, she is not going to give you a list of detailed steps with screen shots, like I did. Well, it's ok, it happens to me all the time.

Needless to say, he did NOT do the list of steps, even though he was continually getting that error. I think it was far too complicated. Finally I just fixed it for him. Then he kept changing stuff back, and I said, please change that stuff back because it will throw the error again.

Something funny is that we were working a lot on the iSeries, which is this type of system that has an MS-DOS looking interface (incidentally, my dad spent 25 or so years at IBM developing the iSeries). In the iSeries you go around to different screens and do stuff, much like on any computer. Anyway, all of the screens list their name at the top, and to get to the screen you type in the name of it. That's the first thing that you learn how to do. So this guy I was just talking about sends me a screen shot of one of the screens called PR49 and said "Do you know how to get to this screen?" I replied "Ummmmmmmm....type PR49???" I laughed a lot, and so did my boss. You see, because it's the first thing you learn about iSeries..........ahhh...............nerd joke.

What else...the project I was working on turned out really, really well. I was very proud. However, I learned suddenly at 3:30 that I needed to write documentation for it for a meeting tomorrow. PLUS I had to do Icelandic tonight so I had a busy night. Got it all done though. The documentation wasn't too bad. It was only a page. I thought for sure it would be at least 3.

I seem to be writing a lot of negative stuff about work lately...oh well. Hehe...there are good things! It's been very busy the past week or so. My boss reminds me a lot to calm down. Having a lot of work always makes me really energetic, which is weird.

I had a strange exercise in Icel. tonight. I got to this page that had a picture of a living room with stuff in it and the directions were all in Icelandic. Usually they have an English translation just in case, but this one didn't. (Side note: on something I was looking at today it had the word "enska" because it was the heading for the column of English words and on first glance I thought it had gotten my user name from somewhere. HAHA) So this picture thing, I hardly understood the directions because the directions said to write down the words of things in the picture. Really? Just write the words down? (And by the way, I didn't KNOW the words yet) Am I wrong to think that's weird? Well, I did it, by looking in a dictionary. I would have thought I'd have to write the words by the thing, or write something about the words like how to decline the noun.

So I learned about a million and a half nouns and also how to say "I think that......." and some past tense stuff.

I am hungry. And kinda tired! And my legs hurt from exercisin'.