The Week From Hell
At first blush, this past week should have been pretty fun. "Should have been" being the operative phrase here.
My wife and two oldest daughters left Monday afternoon to go to girl scout camp, and I was left to entertain the two youngest, ages 4 and 2, respectively.
In times past, whenever my wife would leave for camp, PTA convention or anything else, I would always make sure that the house was nice and clean to come home to. The odds were stacked against me from the moment she pulled away.
The first afternoon was relatively uneventful. My grandparents, thinking that I would probably starve to death on my own and, more importantly, starve their great-grandchildren, invited us up for dinner. We ate dinner with them, and afterward, I fixed part of their sprinkler system and their desktop computer (I'm useful for odd jobs like that).
I changed the 2-yr old's diaper on the kitchen floor, and hadn't realized that he had been drinking a cup of lemonade while I was changing him (my focus being totally devoted to mess that was his rear end). When I finished changing him, he sat up, and then I saw the little boy-shaped puddle of lemonade on the floor. And noticed his shirt was soaked through. And his hair was soaked as well.
We went home, and I got the boy to sleep, but my 4-yr old announced that she wanted to watch Monsters Inc before she went to bed. It was after 10:00, and I thought she'd probably doze off in front of the TV after about 15 minutes. Wrongo. She stayed awake for the entire show. And the credits. And the extra little bits at the end. So, somewhere around midnight, I finally got her to sleep. She woke up at about 3:30 with a bad dream, and then the boy woke up at about 6:00, wanting a bottle. We all curled up together in the same bed, them at weird angles and me in a strange contorted position, trying to stay on the bed while they pushed and kicked against me in their sleep. My back and neck still hurt from that... even today.
Tuesday
We got up at about 9:00, dressed and piled in the car, heading north to "the dinosaur park", which includes several acres of life-sized dinosaur sculptures, a few playgrounds here and there, a "fossil pit" (giant sandbox where kids can expose dinosaur bones and eggs with brushes) and a museum with a few animatronic dinosaurs and a handful of dino skeletons. It was actually fun for about the first hour and a half, until my daughter figured that she was tired enough to ride in the stroller with her brother, but not too tired to leave yet.
"Lets go down that path!" She'd say.
"We've been down that path already."
"How about that one?"
"We've been down that one three times already."
"No we haven't."
"Yes we have... that's where all of the big dinosaur footprints are... remember?"
"Oh... yeah. How about that one?"
"Been there, done that."
I finally bribed her away from the park with a lunchtime trip to McDonald's. We got our food and were sitting down in the playland area when I notice that my son is missing. I ask my daughter to go into the big playland structure and look for her brother. She flat out refused, more interested in her happy meal toy than the possibility of a missing sibling. I begged, pleaded, bribed and finally threatened my daughter to get her to help me. Nothing. Finally, I just left her at the table and searched the restaurant for my little boy, finding him hanging out by the bathrooms at the other end of the restaurant. I grabbed him and my daughter and left the place, embarrassed and livid.
Not long after we got home, the phone rang. It was my supervisor. "I've got some good news and some bad news" he says. Good news was, we weren't going to be late for our company day at the Lagoon Amusement Park because of last minute work on an impending deadline. The bad news, however, was that our impending deadline had been moved up two days... to 1:00pm Wednesday. Oh, and there were some pretty substantial changes to the plans, too. Let's just say that it was a good thing my kids were down for a nap at the moment, otherwise they would have learned a lot of new words... "colorful euphemisms", I like to call them.
This latest wrench in the plans meant that I would have to pile the kids into the car around 7:00pm and drive to the office, which is about an hour's trip in 100 degree heat in a car whose A/C is kaput.
Upon reaching the office, I find that my network profile has been redone in my absence. Translation: Every customization I had in every program, including address books, bookmark files, scripts... everything... was gone. No backups. Nothing. I have the unenviable task of rewriting most of those scripts now. Beauty. It took me about a half hour to download all of the needed files onto my laptop.
On the way home, I stopped by Wal-Mart to buy my little boy a package of diapers. Coming back out of the store, I strapped my kids into their respective car seats, leaving the package of diapers in the shopping cart. I discovered this about 5 minutes after I got home, hurriedly throwing the kids back into the car again, and speeding back down to the store. The cart was in the same place, but the diapers were gone. I asked a door greeter if anyone had turned the diapers in during the past few minutes. She called management, and sure enough, one of the assistant managers happened to be walking past the cart on his way into the store, and picked them up.
We got home, I put the kids to bed and stayed up from 11:00 to 2:00, working on the project from hell. I went to bed until 8:00, then continued working on the project, cursing the architect as the bane of my existence.
Wednesday
Working from home while trying to keep an eye on small children simply does not work. This included the boy gnawing through a couple of otter pops and spilling their liquid contents all over the family room floor and sofa. Then it was dry cereal. Then my daughter had an accident and peed all over the bathroom floor... and neglected to tell me anything about it... While cleaning that mess up, the boy wandered in and started messing around with the computer, which earned him a good yelling at, which in turn meant I had to pick him up and comfort him, or he would continue screaming and add to me already burgeoning migraine headache.
I finally submitted everything that I could possibly finish by email by 1:30. Then I got a call from my wife, saying that they were running about an hour late. I spent the hour picking up around the house as much as I could, while microwaving chicken nuggets for the kids. My wife and kids arrived home, in a most foul mood. Apparently, the teenage camp counselors weren't worth their weight in much of anything, and there were other troops up there that were the epitome of the snobby, sassy troops. No bear attacks, though, which is always a good thing.
I had promised my youngest two children, who had endured a lot with me over the course of the past few days, a trip to the shake store for some delicious ice cream shakes. My wife asked if it was just a trip for us, or if everyone was invited. "Of course everyone is invites..." I sighed. Then she says "Oh, you were planning on going to Jakes? How are we going to afford that? I'll just stay home and figure out where the money will come from..." In those few short moments, she had transformed into her mother, and had managed to suck the life out of something that should have been pretty fun. I ended up just taking the two youngest up to the local dairy and buying them each a cone with what money I had in my change tray in the car. Times like this, I wish they would have been gone a bit longer.
Thursday
Thursday morning at the office started off with a closed door meeting between the big boss, my supervisor and I. The big boss was boiling mad about a mistake that could cost us up to $20,000... and it seems I was the one who made it.
Last winter, while I was on-site at one of our construction projects, mapping out the existing storm drain system, my supervisor calls up and asks "Do we have sewer in the street to the south?" I check the intersection above me and the one below me... both have sewer manholes. There are houses that front onto this road, and it's one of the main roads in the subdivision. "Yeah, there's sewer here."
Apparently, there wasn't.
There is only one spot in the entire mile-long length of this road that does not have sewer pipe in it. That would be the section that we needed. I t would be a change-order... a very costly one, and the architect wanted us to eat the cost. I had visions of the unemployment line dancing through my head at this time.
I jumped in the car and headed over to the sewer district to see what data they could give me, and found a sewer manhole that we could tap our pipe into that wasn't too far away, and just might work, so I brought the data back to our engineer and presented it to him, and he thinks it's definitely doable.
THEN, to put icing on the cake, the big boss comes in and asks me to copy some documents off electronically for a customer who is waiting. I go to the project directory, only to find that said directory is completely missing from the network, and the network admin is on vacation! Oh, yay!!!!! It just keeps getting better! The one bright spot this week was that our office shut down at noon on Thursday for our annual company party at Lagoon.
I had a very enjoyable time with the kiddles on some fun thrill rides, in the waterpark and on the kiddie rides as well.... A little bit of good to balance out a hell of a lot of bad.
I've really got to get my karma sorted out...
My wife and two oldest daughters left Monday afternoon to go to girl scout camp, and I was left to entertain the two youngest, ages 4 and 2, respectively.
In times past, whenever my wife would leave for camp, PTA convention or anything else, I would always make sure that the house was nice and clean to come home to. The odds were stacked against me from the moment she pulled away.
The first afternoon was relatively uneventful. My grandparents, thinking that I would probably starve to death on my own and, more importantly, starve their great-grandchildren, invited us up for dinner. We ate dinner with them, and afterward, I fixed part of their sprinkler system and their desktop computer (I'm useful for odd jobs like that).
I changed the 2-yr old's diaper on the kitchen floor, and hadn't realized that he had been drinking a cup of lemonade while I was changing him (my focus being totally devoted to mess that was his rear end). When I finished changing him, he sat up, and then I saw the little boy-shaped puddle of lemonade on the floor. And noticed his shirt was soaked through. And his hair was soaked as well.
We went home, and I got the boy to sleep, but my 4-yr old announced that she wanted to watch Monsters Inc before she went to bed. It was after 10:00, and I thought she'd probably doze off in front of the TV after about 15 minutes. Wrongo. She stayed awake for the entire show. And the credits. And the extra little bits at the end. So, somewhere around midnight, I finally got her to sleep. She woke up at about 3:30 with a bad dream, and then the boy woke up at about 6:00, wanting a bottle. We all curled up together in the same bed, them at weird angles and me in a strange contorted position, trying to stay on the bed while they pushed and kicked against me in their sleep. My back and neck still hurt from that... even today.
Tuesday
We got up at about 9:00, dressed and piled in the car, heading north to "the dinosaur park", which includes several acres of life-sized dinosaur sculptures, a few playgrounds here and there, a "fossil pit" (giant sandbox where kids can expose dinosaur bones and eggs with brushes) and a museum with a few animatronic dinosaurs and a handful of dino skeletons. It was actually fun for about the first hour and a half, until my daughter figured that she was tired enough to ride in the stroller with her brother, but not too tired to leave yet.
"Lets go down that path!" She'd say.
"We've been down that path already."
"How about that one?"
"We've been down that one three times already."
"No we haven't."
"Yes we have... that's where all of the big dinosaur footprints are... remember?"
"Oh... yeah. How about that one?"
"Been there, done that."
I finally bribed her away from the park with a lunchtime trip to McDonald's. We got our food and were sitting down in the playland area when I notice that my son is missing. I ask my daughter to go into the big playland structure and look for her brother. She flat out refused, more interested in her happy meal toy than the possibility of a missing sibling. I begged, pleaded, bribed and finally threatened my daughter to get her to help me. Nothing. Finally, I just left her at the table and searched the restaurant for my little boy, finding him hanging out by the bathrooms at the other end of the restaurant. I grabbed him and my daughter and left the place, embarrassed and livid.
Not long after we got home, the phone rang. It was my supervisor. "I've got some good news and some bad news" he says. Good news was, we weren't going to be late for our company day at the Lagoon Amusement Park because of last minute work on an impending deadline. The bad news, however, was that our impending deadline had been moved up two days... to 1:00pm Wednesday. Oh, and there were some pretty substantial changes to the plans, too. Let's just say that it was a good thing my kids were down for a nap at the moment, otherwise they would have learned a lot of new words... "colorful euphemisms", I like to call them.
This latest wrench in the plans meant that I would have to pile the kids into the car around 7:00pm and drive to the office, which is about an hour's trip in 100 degree heat in a car whose A/C is kaput.
Upon reaching the office, I find that my network profile has been redone in my absence. Translation: Every customization I had in every program, including address books, bookmark files, scripts... everything... was gone. No backups. Nothing. I have the unenviable task of rewriting most of those scripts now. Beauty. It took me about a half hour to download all of the needed files onto my laptop.
On the way home, I stopped by Wal-Mart to buy my little boy a package of diapers. Coming back out of the store, I strapped my kids into their respective car seats, leaving the package of diapers in the shopping cart. I discovered this about 5 minutes after I got home, hurriedly throwing the kids back into the car again, and speeding back down to the store. The cart was in the same place, but the diapers were gone. I asked a door greeter if anyone had turned the diapers in during the past few minutes. She called management, and sure enough, one of the assistant managers happened to be walking past the cart on his way into the store, and picked them up.
We got home, I put the kids to bed and stayed up from 11:00 to 2:00, working on the project from hell. I went to bed until 8:00, then continued working on the project, cursing the architect as the bane of my existence.
Wednesday
Working from home while trying to keep an eye on small children simply does not work. This included the boy gnawing through a couple of otter pops and spilling their liquid contents all over the family room floor and sofa. Then it was dry cereal. Then my daughter had an accident and peed all over the bathroom floor... and neglected to tell me anything about it... While cleaning that mess up, the boy wandered in and started messing around with the computer, which earned him a good yelling at, which in turn meant I had to pick him up and comfort him, or he would continue screaming and add to me already burgeoning migraine headache.
I finally submitted everything that I could possibly finish by email by 1:30. Then I got a call from my wife, saying that they were running about an hour late. I spent the hour picking up around the house as much as I could, while microwaving chicken nuggets for the kids. My wife and kids arrived home, in a most foul mood. Apparently, the teenage camp counselors weren't worth their weight in much of anything, and there were other troops up there that were the epitome of the snobby, sassy troops. No bear attacks, though, which is always a good thing.
I had promised my youngest two children, who had endured a lot with me over the course of the past few days, a trip to the shake store for some delicious ice cream shakes. My wife asked if it was just a trip for us, or if everyone was invited. "Of course everyone is invites..." I sighed. Then she says "Oh, you were planning on going to Jakes? How are we going to afford that? I'll just stay home and figure out where the money will come from..." In those few short moments, she had transformed into her mother, and had managed to suck the life out of something that should have been pretty fun. I ended up just taking the two youngest up to the local dairy and buying them each a cone with what money I had in my change tray in the car. Times like this, I wish they would have been gone a bit longer.
Thursday
Thursday morning at the office started off with a closed door meeting between the big boss, my supervisor and I. The big boss was boiling mad about a mistake that could cost us up to $20,000... and it seems I was the one who made it.
Last winter, while I was on-site at one of our construction projects, mapping out the existing storm drain system, my supervisor calls up and asks "Do we have sewer in the street to the south?" I check the intersection above me and the one below me... both have sewer manholes. There are houses that front onto this road, and it's one of the main roads in the subdivision. "Yeah, there's sewer here."
Apparently, there wasn't.
There is only one spot in the entire mile-long length of this road that does not have sewer pipe in it. That would be the section that we needed. I t would be a change-order... a very costly one, and the architect wanted us to eat the cost. I had visions of the unemployment line dancing through my head at this time.
I jumped in the car and headed over to the sewer district to see what data they could give me, and found a sewer manhole that we could tap our pipe into that wasn't too far away, and just might work, so I brought the data back to our engineer and presented it to him, and he thinks it's definitely doable.
THEN, to put icing on the cake, the big boss comes in and asks me to copy some documents off electronically for a customer who is waiting. I go to the project directory, only to find that said directory is completely missing from the network, and the network admin is on vacation! Oh, yay!!!!! It just keeps getting better! The one bright spot this week was that our office shut down at noon on Thursday for our annual company party at Lagoon.
I had a very enjoyable time with the kiddles on some fun thrill rides, in the waterpark and on the kiddie rides as well.... A little bit of good to balance out a hell of a lot of bad.
I've really got to get my karma sorted out...
posted by Anonymous at 4:05 PM
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