Bad Day: Getting Worse?

I'm ready to go drinking right now. It's 12:30 PM.

To be honest, I was ready to go drinking at 10:16 AM, and I show up at work late, folks.

Today started with a shower. That's always a plus, and doubly so because I haven't bathed since Sunday. The day quickly fell to pieces after that. I get to my desk and check my mail. I have one message from a consultant: "I'll be at your place at 10 AM, can you make sure you have the Exchange Server CD handy?" I check my watch: it's 9:53 AM.

On top of that, the audio in our auditorium is non-existent and no one seems to know why. We have an event in there on Friday morning because someone in Special Events didn't bother to check if the room was ready after Body Worlds 2 cleared out. It's not.

Yesterday, I don't think I drank enough. The phone would seriously not stop ringing as the whiny people went on and on with their problems. It hurts to be the only competent person in a big company sometimes. It must be nice acting completely clueless and having the added insurance that someone who knows what they're doing will be able to swing in and save the day for you time and again. I wonder where my savior is.

Yesterday, I had to show a woman how to search through her e-mail. In the Netscape, Mozilla, and Thunderbird mail clients, there is a search box above your messages clearly marked with "sender or subject contains" or thereabouts. You type "Joe Smith" and it will automagically show you all of the messages with "Joe Smith" in either the subject or the sender column. I had to point this out to her, because apparently reading her e-mail every day for the year she's been here has not clued her in to its existence. Then Erica bit me for some reason. She's a mean drunk.

I managed to find the Exchange Server CD right on time and today is starting to even out, with the exception of the auditorium audio. I'm fairly sure the reason why is that the consultant was the one doing all the hand-holding today, as right now I've got zero patience for training anyone on anything. I'm very tired and I wonder if I'll make through today without yelling at someone. I'm ready for a vacation, or some other kind of nice time away from it all. Maybe a crime spree.

Update 1: Erica brought me barbecue potato chips for lunch today and we ate outside because the weather was nice. But then I got a phone call from some tech at another organization because someone who's working here for the season can't log into his own e-mail account there. First this guy calls me and says "I can't check my e-mail at that other place from here." And I say to him "Maybe you should call them and ask why." So he does, but then, for reasons still alien to me, I get the phone call with the correct URL, login sequence, and such. Seriously, people. WTF? Why am I even a part of this sick sad turn of events?

Update 2: It's 4:45 PM and I just want to go home and curl up into a ball and go to sleep. The consultant spent all of maybe an hour and a half setting up some folks upstairs to use the Exchange server, so good for him. He needed the server's Administrator password, and I wasn't about to tell it to him when just anybody could overhear it. Since I was kind of rushed, I didn't think twice about kicking the door closed to tell it to him in privacy, which he apparently thought was cool but a bit scary. "Grrr. Argh." I'm a mutant enemy.