Plagued

Not technically the plague, though it sure as shit felt like it at times. However – I think I’m finally over the hump and getting past this interminable crap.

Still can’t talk worth shit though, which is kind of a big deal since my “day” job is spent on the phone. Not that my phone’s helping, either. My sweet wireless headset took a nosedive last weekend. We replaced the headset with a new one – and I can’t hear it. Oh, I can hear enough to know it’s technically working, but not enough for it to be functionally usable.

I ran into this before. I had to delete and re-install the audio on my work computer. I just updated the audio drivers – going to try that first, but if not – we’ll do the uninstall/reinstall again, I guess. We shall see if it legitimately helps or not.

One truly good detail about this week: I FINALLY received my new computer from Dell, the one I ordered to replace the one I had to return because it was a lemon. And I’m not talking lemon chiffon, either. This new computer is DA BOMB. I hate to admit it, but I’m glad the first one was so shitty I had to return it, because this one is freaking AWESOME. It’s technically a gaming computer, though I don’t plan to use it for gaming. I’ll spare you all the technical jargon. Suffice to say, this thing’s fast AND it’s bigger than the one I returned. It has a 17-inch screen, the biggest you can get in a laptop for most brands. Let’s face it. Size matters.

Last week was training for a new system we’re bringing in on my day job. My boss and I laughed, because we discovered it’s got a couple of nasty bugs – the same nasty bugs as plagued the “new system” in my previous job before it went south.

I don’t know if I mentioned it here or not, but my boss at this job was also my boss at my previous job. He’s the reason I jumped ship when I did (and thank God for it!) We both knew all the pitfalls of the horrendous mess we were using before the previous employer imploded. He and I were working hand-in-hand trying to figure out how to make an unusable program usable.

And we have just discovered that this new software – the one which is quickly becoming the industry standard for our business model – was built by the same people.

The end user businesses don’t see a lot of it because they only use their local instance. But with us, where we manage multiple locations, it’s a frigging nightmare. Sadder still, I’m not sure there’s a solution.

The good news with this is I already know what the pitfalls are and know most of the workarounds it’s going to take to deal with them, at least short-term. The downside is, it’s unusable as it is for more than one or two locations. And we currently manage about twenty-five.

Since I was so miserably sick for the past couple of weeks, I haven’t achieved much of anything else along the way. I cooked when I could stay on my feet long enough, and otherwise resorted to grocery-store takeout (i.e. rotisserie chicken, that sort of thing.)

One downside to the new computer: it won’t connect to our printer. I even downloaded the software from the HP site, and it won’t install. It arbitrarily uninstalled Photoshop after I’d installed it, so I had to re-install it. This thing has definitely got its idiosyncrasies.