A way overdue post!

 It's been a long time since my last post, and a lot has changed since then. I went through a divorce, ran into the love of my life after being apart for 27 years and got married, COVID, got laid-off, was unemployed for over a year, lost my father, moved to a different city, and recently started a new job.

There's a lot more that went on in between but needless to say the last 9 years have been a bit crazy.

Today's post actually happened to me, and it makes me laugh every time tI see the error message. I was working in Visio, making some diagrams, and all of a sudden Visio froze and this error popped up:

This takes the prize for the "Most Ambiguous Error" I have ever seen in my career. I still have no idea what caused it, and haven't been able to replicate it! What are some crazy errors you've seen? Post them in the comments!

Motivation

The past few days I've been feeling a little down and defeated. It's been a struggle just to get up and get dressed. I opened Facebook to see what was happening in my friends lives and came across this video. It really struck a cord with me and I wanted to take a break from the "Stupid Human Tricks" for a few minutes and share it with you. I hope it resounds with you as it did me. Life is short. Make the best of it.

It's soooo confusing!

This morning I was working on the VP of HR's laptop and noticed our "wonderful" antivirus had an alert. I opened it up and checked out the log to see what it found. It showed malware being active. So I click on the log and it show "Task stopped." Cool! It actually worked like it was supposed to! 

My curiosity kicked in and I had to see what it found, so I click to get more information. Under application name it showed...the name of our "wonderful" antivirus! So it basically killed itself thinking it was malware. Priceless!

I knew our company antivirus was crap, but this just made me laugh! Of course I had to screenshot it and send it to the person in charge of our antivirus! Gotta love cheapskates!

All hands on deck!

Friday, my boss told me to have all my guys show up before 8a today for a department move. We have staggered start times, so for a couple of my guys this is pretty early. With the promise of breakfast burrito's and donuts, everyone showed up at the designated time. The plan was to un-box and setup all the new equipment, and image all the computers (meaning to install the operating system and necessary software) in place to save time.

We loaded up our cart with all the equipment needed to move the requested department into the new area, and headed out to start the day before it got too hot. We support the smallest distribution center (warehouse) in our company, and it covers just over 600,000 square feet. It is not temperature controller, so during the Texas summers it tends to get a little warm.

While the guys were taking the equipment over, I stayed behind to finish a few things up, then headed over to check on them. When I walked up, they are all standing around with all the equipment still on the cart. My most senior tech walks over.

Nick: Is this the right place? Or is it over there? (He points a ways off)

Me: No, this is it. Why? What's wrong?

Nick: There's no power.

Me: *looks around* What?

Nick: Remember last summer when we moved that other department out of this area? They had everything connected to one 25 foot extension cord and a really long power strip?

Me: ...oh yeah. Let's go find

So off we go to talk to the manager, who is still in the morning warehouse meeting. I open the door to the conference room and am greeted with some "not so friendly" glares.

Operations Director: Can I help you?

Me: We're trying to do the move for , but there's no power in the area.

Facilities supervisor: Oh, well they're coming to pull electrical over there tomorrow.

Me: ...*turns around and walks out*

For this being a technology company, they sure don't think things through very much.

/smh

I love you man!

Our Desktop team is a little "eclectic." We are all weird, geeky, and have very odd senses of humor. That's what makes us "fit" and work so well together. One of my guys was out sick yesterday, and when he came in this morning, the following short conversation had me laughing hard!

Tech 1: Missed you yesterday dude. I actually had to do work and stuff. It was weird.
Tech 2: You want a hug?
Tech 1: Get away from me bro.
Tech 2: Fist bump?
Tech 1: Dude...seriously...

I love these guys! ROFL

Houston, we have a problem

Manager: I need you to image 5 computers for packing stations in the warehouse.

Me: Ok. I've never imaged those particular computers. Do you know where the image file is located?

Manager: Ask William. He'll know.

Me: William, where can I find the pack station image?

William: It should be on the CIFs.

Me: Do you know WHICH share?

William: Ask the guys in Ohio. They should know.

Me: Hey guys, do you know where I can find the pack station image?

Ohio tech: It's on the shared drive.

Me:...WHERE on the shared drive?

Ohio tech:The two images we use the most are SpeedFbuntu-10.04-packing-new-building

for pack station and SpeedFbuntu-10.04-the-rest-new-building for lead or returns stations.

Me: Ok...but WHERE on the share are they located??

Ohio tech: *silence*

Ohio Lead: The images we use won't work at your location.

Me: *sigh*

Yep...it's Monday.

Ah management...

I thought I'd do something a little different in this post. We have a weekly meeting/conference call. This is what one of my tech's Tweeted (and FYI, I'm not the boss he was referring to...lol) He was Tweeting this live during our meeting and told me about it after the fact. He is referring to systems that I had put together a few months ago. 

 First Tweet: "Yeah, you know that spreadsheet you do everyday to track your work? Yeah, that's been useless. So we're going to expand it."
My boss ladies and gentlemen.

Second Tweet: "Hey, you know that asset tracking system you put together and I told you we were going to do something else? Yeah, keep doing that system anyways."

Final Tweet: "On second thought, yeah don't do that. The original plan we shelved you for is back on. Or maybe not. Wait, I don't want to make decisions."

I love this guy! LOL