Today I got to work on time. I have been, lately, but recently I was missing by five minutes often. Big picture, no big deal, I often leave 10 minutes late… but.

Today at 7:00 am promptly the plant manager called me. And I was at my desk.

That little problem yesterday with orders? No orders dropped to ship from 12:30 yesterday until the same time today. We were experiencing a major problem with our main database and nobody thought to tell us. So the first call today was from the plant manager asking me who he should call to fix this problem.

The second call today was the plant manager telling me to start dropping orders automatically. This was one of those requests where your life starts flashing before your eyes. It’s easy for me to identify all the sales orders we have on us; it’s hard to pick out of that mountain the ones that are actually eligible to ship. I imagined myself frantically trying to drop hundreds of orders and getting duds.

A long time ago, over the course of a long time, I worked to get myself an Access application that would tell me the ship eligibility of every order on the system. Hardly daring to hope, I tried it out again. Yes, reader, it failed me. It came up blank right where I needed to see the status. Something had failed.

But, the orders from last night had been researched (to find the shipment number) without ever being reset or redropped. I helped get those taken care of, then checked on the problem with my order status queries and was able to quickly resolve the issue and drop more orders.

Then I got the third call of the day. Well, it was an instant-message. My boss’ boss told me to keep track of every single line that I dropped because when IT fixed the problem they might all drop again.

As in, every heroic thing I did to fix the problem would ultimately make the problem worse.

It turned out that they were able to not re-drop our orders so none of the work was in vain. It was hard for the day to get worse from there, so it got better instead. But somehow I still didn’t get done that last first-of-the-month report that, in one giddy moment of optimism, I thought I was going to get done on Tuesday.

On to Friday!