It’s been a long, hectic week. The big project that was supposed to go live a week ago didn’t completely go live until last night. It took an entire week to do something it should have taken seconds to do, but with any big switchover it’s inevitable that things will go wrong. Like thousands of medications having to be scanned by hand because the old database is suddenly, “unforeseeably” incompatible. Someone, somewhere lied to someone else, somewhere else and really screwed everything up.
To anticipate the final go-live last night the powers that be put us all on 12-hour shifts, putting about 6 people on the night shift where I am usually the only one working. We were all bored shitless. We didn’t even find out the system had gone live until nearly an hour after it happened, and then it was just an afterthought. I took the initiative to go floor-by-floor to talk to the nurses and see if there were problems they weren’t reporting. Turns out there were tons of problems that they were reporting, but the software vendor supporting the new system was pretty much just telling them to deal with it. Fill out a complaint form and deal with it. Good policy. The bad thing is that on my tour I realized there is no separation between the third-party software support, which isn’t me, and the on-site dedicated PC support that has nothing to do with the software, which IS me. So there were lots of people that were really mad at me. I lost count of how many people passed me saying something along the lines of “I don’t EVEN want to see you people right now,” or “You can just turn around and get back in the elevator.”
I tried on several floors to explain the difference between me and the other support group and felt like I was making some headway and then some old nurse from the 7th floor pointed me out to the Charge Nurse on the 5th floor saying I was the reason it took them 4 hours to deliver the 9pm drug pass. I could see the fire light in her eyes, and then spread like a brush fire in a drought from one nurse to the other. That’s when I turned around and got back in the elevator I had just come out of.
To further that feeling of train wreck, we were told that we’d be on 12-hour shifts all week, not just last night. It wasn’t a big deal to me. It didn’t really affect when I woke up or what time I got off, it just meant that more of my day that I’d be surfing for porn or drinking lattés was now being spent sitting at my desk trying to get all my IM’s working on my Blackberry (which I kind of hate having). However, when I got in to work today, and had sat around for about 40 minutes someone suddenly asked me why I was there. They had been talking to me the whole time and it just dawned on them that I was there and wasn’t supposed to be. Seems I missed out on that e-mail that said “hey, you don’t have to be there for 12 hours anymore.” So I got up and left. It’s not like I’m going to sit around for a few hours for no reason, when I don’t have to. Oh, what’s that noise? I think I hear the train coming again…let’s see if we can wreck it again tonight.
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