Ring that bell one more time...

Do you ever have a bad day at work? I am having one of those NO BELL days. LOL... I work in a computer room which is a secure environment which requires you have a KEY to enter OR you ring a bell. How irritating is that? I feel like Pavlov's dog all of a sudden. Most of the time I put up with the irritation however we have been short one employee this week and I have been pulling double duty doing my job and hers. The bad thing is that I am still learning how to do her job much less mine since I have been here a sum total of 2.5 months.
This morning I am focusing on editing paramater files on VMS which requires my utmost attention to detail. RING RING RING goes the bell constantly. I keep having to get out of my chair and go answer the door. Ok, that is a given, folks need in to get help or do their jobs etc. However, when someone that has a key rings the bell and then just walks away as if they did not ring it that is the final straw. It is even worse when it is your BOSS. So, the bell rings for the umpteenth time, I get up and salivate as I walk towards the door. (Remember the trained response right?) I get to the door as two ladies are slowly walking away. I open the door and stand half way into the hallway and watch my boss walk away. I wait until my boss walks back to the door and when she does not offer any explanation as to why they rang the bell I told her that the next time the bell rings while I am trying to concentrate I will remove the door from its hinges. Of course this was not my direct supervisor nor does my supervisor even answer to this person but she is a director type level person. Can you imagine the look on her face when I advised her that I was going to take the door off the hinges? LOL... Luckily for me she did not take me serious and just told me that maybe they need to hand out more keys for folks to get in that needed them. I was thinking, what a novel idea that would be.
Now , I know, to some that may seem like a tiny thing to be irritated about. The problem with our being interrupted multiple times per day when we are trying to focus on minute detail is that it causes us to make mistakes when our concentration is broken constantly. Here is an example of what I am talking about. In order to delete files on VMS you have to type in a command like this. del hrcc$data:cpy080d*.dat;* Yesterday evening I typed del hrcc$data:cpy080*.dat;* which in turn deleted 28 files. At most it should have deleted 8 files. I thought about that being a larger number than normal but did not think much more about it. So, I finished the task at hand and went to run the manual job on vms and it failed. That is when it occured to me to look back at the del command I did. It took me several comparisons to realize that the D was not there which means I deleted 24 extra control files that were needed by other programs that would be run either manually or in enterprise scheduler. When you delete a file on VMS it is GONE. POOF. No recycle bin to retrieve it from. So, luckily for me the VMS systems admin was in her office and we used this as a training experience for James to do a restore from remote tapes to the disk. That mistake took us 60 minutes to fix. THAT is why it is important that we pay attention to every single keystroke when we are on the system. Does the payroll have any significance to you as you think about these processes? Those mistakes can be very costly to everyone in involved. Whew....
So, with all of that in mind there has to be a better solution to ringing the bell millions of times per day. I will be trying to figure out a way to talk the boss into having a business hours OPEN policy as long as someone is in the computer room. If we are not in the computer room then we will lock the door on our way out and then they will have to go to the receptionist and have us paged. Anything has to be better than what we are currently doing. Amen??
Peace OUT....

Right and Wrong choices

We have to make choices every day. Most of the time the choices are not life altering but they certainly can either make our life more pleasant or more miserable. I am thinking about choices because I have made some that might not have been popular with family or friends. As a matter of fact some of my choices have been met with open disdain by some. One of the choices that I have made recently has been to switch from pudding to yogurt. Yogurt is around 140 calories if you pick Dannon Berry in the 5 oz container. If you select the pudding parfait at the Hungry Cougar across the street from where I work you probably consume about 800 or 900 calories. I chose to switch from pudding to yogurt because it is non fat and lower calories. In order to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you take in. I have been counting calories for several months now and I am getting pretty good at guessing how many calories are probably being ingested by yours truly. I am still struggling with getting the calorie count down to 1500 but have been hovering between about 1700 to 2200 depending on the given day and whatever emotional stress I may have been experiencing. If you are an emotional eater the more stress you experience the more you try to medicate yourself with yummy stuff from the fridge. I think that I might be self medicating late at night in front of the idiot box. With regards to choices I have had to reprioritize my expectations for whom a friend is and a friend is not. This has caused me more emotional trauma than i would care to admit. You think that you know who your friends are until all of a sudden they quit acting like a friend. After much soul searching I have realized that friendships are a two way street. God gives us unconditional love which is called AGAPE love. God loves us despite our sin and failures. I am not saying that God ignores the sin or is blind to it but if we will come to him with our failures and ask for forgiveness the word of God says that our sin is forgotten and is as far as the east is from the west. God can and will forgive us for our faults and shortcomings however it has become painfully obvious to me that some of my so called friends do not know how to do that. That is why human love is called phileo or brotherly love and it is not unconditional as much as we would like to think it is. Just the other day I had to come to the realization that my expectation for a friendship that I thought was there has long since been destroyed. I was hanging on to the hope that the friendship could be restored over a period of time but I think that I was fooling myself with that expectation. How many times have we done things in a relationship that has caused a tear in the very fabric? Depending on the size of the hole time might allow it to mend and heal. I guess in this instance I must have driven a full sized sherman tank through this relationship and now there are nothing but large treadmarks and oil spills all over the place. I need to understand that I did do and say some things that caused this damage and there is apparently nothing I can do to repair it. As the old saying goes "It is finished". For those of you that know me and love me (or not) you know that while I am not a social butterfly I do enjoy human contact. I am not a loner but rather I love interaction with my fellow man. My pastor told me not long ago that he noticed that trait in me and that it was neither good nor bad but when I am dealing with others I need to realize not everyone needs as much fellowship as I do. That was an eye opener for me when he said that and gave me a whole new perspective on things. So, as I have had to close the book on this friendship that I am thinking about it saddens me. It saddens me that I did so much damage that it could not be repaired. It saddens me that I have to think of this person differently when I see them. It saddens me to think that I really would rather not see them because of the emotional distress that the memories cause. I am saddened to think that I did not cherish this friendship deeply enough to do whatever I could to keep it healthy. I am saddened to think that neither me nor my friend were able to communicate effectively enough to mend whatever fences needed mending. I am saddened by the thought that I did so much damage to the relationship that the other person could no longer forgive me and give me a chance. How about them COWBOYS!!!!




James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
http://moffittjc.blogharbor.com/blog
james.moffitt@comcast.net