Grumble and Grouch

Monday, Ick.

I could subtitle this, Jeni Whines.

Okay, so it's Monday. How many things could possibly go wrong?

It's the beginning of the month. In my work, the end of the month takes a lot of extra care because of all the end of period processing that needs to be done. However, usually if one thing goes wrong, it's not too big a deal...you can handle it and go on.

Friday night, our system backup overran the tape length and it wanted another tape to complete the backup. I chose to abort the backup instead of packing my sleeping son up in the car and heading down to the office to put another friggin tape in the machine. No big deal, we do this every once in a while and it's not a problem.

Everything that night processed beautifully from what I could tell, no problems. Except for one thing. I had changed the printer ribbon before I left on Friday, but didn't test it. This is also not a big deal...I usually just check to make sure it's threaded right ,and it was. However, in this case, the ribbon was defective, so the entire box of paper printed blank. Okay, so now we do have a pretty bad problem because 90% of the reports can't be duplicated once they have printed and we don't make a backup copy before they're sent to the printer. We COULD restore the database from the backup tape and rerun all the processing in a test environment, thus creating new reports identical to the ones we didn't get becaue of the bad printer ribbon. But the backup tape of the database is bad. So we're SOL on that. Arrrgh!

Now, we also have this little bug that happens every once in a blue moon where the information from our Unix system sends our HP3000 some garbage and the accounting program that processes that data goes flippy do. Usually, this is just an annoyance, because we can fix it in the morning. The only time it's a real problem is at the end of the month, when we need that accounting program to calculate the service charges for past due accounts. Of course...what happened? That bug caught us again this time.

Only, because the reports didn't really print, we couldn't see the error report that this had happened. So we printed, decollated, and burst all of our statements. Then we figured out that half of them were wrong. After all, the accounting program only flips out when it gets to the garbage. Everything before that processes fine. Except that when you want to FIX the problem, you have to run the whole thing...not part of it, so to fix it you have to find all the stuff it did before it exploded and undo it.

Okay, so now we have 3,000 statements that are probably bad. We have a box of blank paper that should have been the reports that told us how we did for the month. We have a bad backup tape, rendering it impossible to re-print the vital reports we absolutely must have.

That...and it's Monday. And I'm PMSing. I need chocolate. Thank god it'll be Friday in only 5 more days and I'm on vacation in only two weeks. And I don't live in Afghanistan. And I'm not a Spice Girls fan. And the sun IS shining outside. And the pool at my apartment is now open. And it'll be lunch time in a few minutes. And neither India nor Pakistan has started a global nuclear war. Yet.