Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Today = Fail

Today was one of those days. Things did not go as planned. Mostly because I couldn't get my sh*t together for longer than 40 minutes at a time. This is especially annoying since on an ordinary day, I totally rock.

My husband got on a plane this morning and will be out of town until tomorrow night. I am not joining him primarily because of the mountain of things going on at work.

I work in IT and there are some important things that all happen to be occurring over the next three weeks. One of those things was scheduled to happen today. Suffice it to say that an application was going to be down for a couple hours for maintenance in order to accomplish something that we've been trying to do for several months now. By tomorrow, my client will be happy and order will be restored. Except, of course, that I forgot to hit the "Submit" button that would tell everyone that it was happening. So today I sent out my email to make sure that everything was ready for our big event and.... whoa... nobody told the users. We can't be down for two hours without telling everybody that we're about to be down. That would make me one of the typical annoying IT folk who doesn't care about their users. And let me tell you something folks, I am absolutely the most user-friendly IT person you've ever met. So we have to reschedule all because I missed one little step. (I could easily blame this on the fact that I barely have enough hours in the day to just get through the email in my Inbox, much less actually act on it. Or I could blame it on the fact that I would like to delegate some of my tasks, like pressing the Submit button, but we don't really have anyone I can delegate to. So let's just chalk it up to... oops.)

The rest of my day was a scramble to reschedule what was supposed to happen today, communicate to users, get approvals (again), all while trying to assure the clients on my other four projects that all their issues (completely unrelated to project #1) are being handled as well.

Five o'clock comes. I head home. I would've stayed late to try and get more done, but with the husband out of town, someone really needs to be home with the 4 year old and 9 month old. (Even though the four year old is actually quite self sufficient, really.) 

Anyway, I get home. And 10 minutes after the nanny walks out the door, I realized that I left my 5 day old iPad at work! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!! I think about it. I could leave it there. But I'm not going in to work tomorrow. And it's my BRAND NEW IPAD! And it's not like things frequently go missing from work, but it has happened. And if I go into work on Thursday and it's not there I'm going to be kicking myself. But there's no Daddy. I'd have to bring both the kids. They've both eaten, but by the time I get to work and back, it'll be 30 minutes past bedtime.

I decide to go for it. I figure they'll fall asleep in the car on the way back. We drive the 30 minutes there. We go in. I get my iPad. We stay an extra ten minutes as my 4 year old has a jolly old time looking in the drawers of my cubicle and seeing his picture on the wall and just generally exploring where Mommy works. We stop in my old cubicle that is still unoccupied to show him some cool toys. Baby is getting fussy and I didn't bring a bottle, so I pile the kids back into the car. I get 10 minutes from the building when I discover...

I left the GD iPad in the old cubicle!!! S.O.A.B.!!! It was really everything I could do to not start swearing like a trucker in front of the kids. So I went back. Again. Got the kids out of the car. Back into the building. Got the iPad. Put the kids back into the car. Drove home. Baby transformed from fussy to extremely unhappy. He was SCREAMING in the back for the entire thirty minute drive home. Like, can't-catch-his-breath screaming. It was so sad.

But I got home. I gave him a bottle while simultaneously helping the 4 year old put on his jammies, pull back the covers, and climb into bed. I rocked the baby and eventually got him into his crib.

And so I'd normally be all gripy about what a crummy day today was (and it was) and how I hate when my husband is out of town. But today I'm only semi-gripy. Because the reason my husband isn't here with me is because his grandma's funeral is tomorrow. And I feel like I should be there, but I'm not. And I know that right now he his trying to be supportive to his father and his grandfather who just lost their mother and wife. So as much as my day really sucked, I will always know that I've got everything that really matters. Even if 1/3 of that everything is sleeping 600 miles away tonight.