Clovis Chitwood Heavy Industries

Has it been a week? Yes it has. A short week at that. Monday being Memorial Day. Can’t say I celebrated it properly. I worked, but I guess that’s as an American tribute as any. There were some things I needed to do at Dad’s office anyway so I thought I would go around and make sure all the computers were updated. XP’s SP3 hosed one of them good. It would not even boot. Reinstalled XP and the .NET framework was hosed, so nothing worked, but at least it would boot now. By then it was too late to do anything else, so I reluctantly packed it in knowing that that machine wouldn’t be doing anything useful the next day, but you do what you gotta do. Now it just happened that My Aunt Peggy had come down to visit Mom, so Tuesday night Peggy, Mom, Amy and I were getting together for dinner, which we did, J Alexander’s, had the French Dip, it was great. So then I went back to Dad’s office and after more hours than I wanted to spend got everything working that needed to be working. I guess I shouldn’t complain, if it was easy I wouldn’t get paid to do it. Of course I wasn’t as philosophical about it Monday and Tuesday night. If you were around 18^th Ave. either of those nights you may have heard me expressing my feelings.

I remember sitting there watching Windows boot for the umpteenth time thinking that a big portion of my income if not most of it is derived from troubleshooting, most of the time with very little information. A big part of the time I’m just taking shots in the dark. I do know enough to keep from unnecessarily digging a bigger hole, but sometimes that hole has to get bigger before it can get smaller. Is what most people see as expertise just a willingness to hang in there till you find a solution, well that and an ability to not just blow everything up? Even training has that component. True I’m just regurgitating facts, but if somebody doesn’t get it you have to come up with another way to explain the facts, and sometimes another way again. I’ve dug some pretty deep holes standing in front of a class and trying to explain Revenue Posting Codes or Work In Progress, at least one of those holes I’m still filing in because they call into tech support four or five times a week.

Sometimes it’s amusing, sometimes it’s frustrating, people call tech support and expect you to just know the answer to their problem. Often you do, if somebody calls in wanting to know how to reverse a journal or void a check you tell them. If they want to know how to run a report that will show them the total amount paid broken down by proposal, I don’t know. I break out the Report Handbook and poke around in the system till I can get a report that hopefully gives them the information they need. I’m not doing anything they couldn’t do. Of course since that’s what I’m paid to do so I do it and can usually keep a good attitude about it, paychecks make great attitude adjusters. It gets even more interesting if somebody calls in with an error that I’m unfamiliar with. It’s not like I can open up the hood and see what’s gong on in there. I can’t even talk to the developers unless it’s something huge. I just have to keep poking around at this black box, first trying to get the same output from the same input the customer is using and then if I can do that trying to figure out what’s happening. Of course I’ve got Jay and Jamie and Sam to go to, often they’ve seen the same thing or remember something similar, but what it all comes down to is piddling around in the dark.

Okay that went on a little longer than expected. Wednesday night I relaxed. I couldn’t stop thinking about a conversation I had with Jay earlier in the day so I had to put this together.

Of course I couldn’t stop there:

And one more for now:

I can’t believe it sombody actually rated commies still suck with one star. Not that I’m suprised they gave it a rating of one star it’s that they bothered to vote on it at all. Wow, that means somebody actually looked at it. Neat. I’m actually rather pleased with the drive carefully narcissist on board and ass gas or brass.

I’ve got them up on Zazzle. It’s supperior to CafePress in that You can put up multiples of one item without having to pay for a premium package. Uploading images has been a pain for me though. I’ve still not bought any of the stuff I set up though I am looking hard at the messenger bag on CafePress.

Thursday was my birthday. I don’t know how but I had managed to forget it until Jay walked into my office and started pointing at the date on the calendar. My mind was on something else and I blurted out something about a conference call I had after lunch. He just rolled his eyes and kept pointing at the date. It finally hit me Oh yeah, it’s my birthday. I am 37, or 36 and 366 days, well actually 365 because this was a leap year wasn’t it? We even had cake and ice cream.

Oh and thanks for dinner.

I actually got a birthday card from Charlie and Evelyn. It even had a little something inside. I have never not (it’s okay to use a double negative for emphasis ain’t it?) gotten a card from Charlie and Evelyn on my birthday. I don’t deserve it. I have never personally mailed a card in my life. I’ve given them out in person but I’ve never taken the time to stick a stamp on one and chuck it in the mail. So every time I get a birthday card or Christmas card a little part of me twinges in guilt, but all the rest of my parts smile cause it’s nice to know people out there love you and are thinking of you.

I going to get schmaltzy here for a minute and thank all my friends and family. For some reason I like to picture myself as a loner, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth, of course in my mind’s eye I’m thin and handsome too so maybe I’m just delusional. So if your reading this thanks. I don’t always show it but I do appreciate it.

Well it’s getting late and I want to capture the video I took at Granville last Saturday before I go to bed so I will wrap it up here.

Hang in there baby,