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September 17, 2005
Dear Penthouse
I imagine it happens to all of us. You have a lot of little things at work that need to get done and several larger projects that need attention. The larger projects require a bit more dedicated on-task time -- that is, not 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there, but hours of uninterrupted on-that-task-only time. The smaller projects may fall in the 20-minutes here and there category ... at least you hope they'll only take 20 minutes or so.
I have a project that I've been trying to finish for weeks. There have been several Monday's that I've gone in thinking "Ahhh ... this is the day I get it done," only to have Friday roll around having not spent a single minute on the larger project.
Some of this is caused by people coming to me with problems that will take only 10 or 20 minutes to fix. Even if the task takes a mere 10 minutes it can set a person back an hour or more by the time he gets back up to speed with the project he left. (I read that somewhere, I didn't just make it up.)
Sometimes something that is proposed as needing only a minute or two of time will take hours.
This week I made some serious progress on the bigger project. Monday or Tuesday I had a breakthrough that did nothing less than tickle me sh*tless. In order to keep the momentum going I put off several of the 20-minute jobs until this morning.
The first thing I did was start a Windows 98 install. All the setup files were copied to C:\WIN98 and I had an MSBATCH file to automate the process. I typed SETUP and moved on to something else.
That something else: Installing half a gig of RAM in one of the engineer's computers. I put the case back on before testing the unit -- always a jinx that requires removing the case and reattaching a cable accidentally knocked loose -- but even with that the job was done in fewer than ten minutes.
Another engineer needed MS Office installed. Well, I could do this in my sleep. It looked like I might be able to spend the larger part of my day on the project that has been haunting me.
The MS Office install seemed to go well enough. At least until the ODBC errors started popping up.
Oh. Troubleshooting never makes for great reading. The articles in Penthouse Forum never start
Dear Penthouse,
It's me again.
I had just installed MS Office on one of our female Engineer's computers. As the hardrive throbbed to life ...
See, it just doesn't work. IT stuff doesn't lend itself to randy sexual banter. I guess you could do something with RAM. Well, and there's backdoor. And trojan.
Geez. Maybe IT work is sexier than I thought.
Anyway, we were talking about ODBC errors and how boring troubleshooting is.
An hour following the MS Office install plus an hour while the engineer was at lunch plus another hour equals three hours. And the problem is not fixed.
I'm sure the answer is on the Internet somewhere. I've tried several that I found. So far, no cigar.
How do these sound?
I'd like to format her disk ... nothing
Whattayasay we get together for some I/O ... better, still not good
Nice rack ... not as offensive as it sounds
Nice Hubbells ... I like the way this sounds, but you'd have to be super nerd to recognize the product mentioned.
Ya wanna take a look at my hardware ... nah
Posted by delmer at September 17, 2005 12:08 AM