You just never know
I NEVER know how long things will take.
This morning I went to install Fellowship One’s Check-in app on our Phone-Operator-Secretary-Whatever-you-call-em lady’s computer expecting it would take me about 5 minutes to install the software and about 2 to hook up the printer for the name tag. 45 minutes later after 3 attempts to get .NET 1.1 SP1 installed (somehow downloaded .NET 2, then downloaded 1.1 SP1, but it was just the SP with no .NET, then tried doing it through Windows Update and that failed on install) I finally decided to come back up to my office and remote the machine and finish the job. It took another 20+ minutes to finish it up. Now this is no reflection on FellowshipOne, the box was just not patched to where it needed to be.
This afternoon Dave, our Finance director wanted me to take a look at a printer that we print checks on. The lady who prints them has to flip the stack upside down and then reorder the checks so that the first is last and last is first etc. (Take a minute and wrap your brain around that…) He wanted to know if there was a way to pull from the top of the upside down stack rather than the bottom so that they wouldn’t have to reorder the checks. I expected this to take me at least 45 minutes to be sure that it couldn’t do what he wanted. 2 minutes in to looking, I found that I could tell the printer to print in reverse order (3,2,1) instead of regular(1,2,3) thus fixing the problem all together. The lady who prints the checks isn’t in today, but she’ll try it on Monday and I have a feeling it will work for her.
Whenever I sit down at someone’s desk and tell them “This should just take a few minutes” I always feel like a liar, because there’s very little guarantee that it will take the amount of time I promise.
Too many variables.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Heh, the check thing I went through a little while ago. Our Accounts Payable lady orders the checks the same way. We switched from an HP network to a Canon MultiFunction device and I had to figure that out.
Question if I can be so nosy, what are you going to use the Check-In app for in regards to the operator lady
October 15th, 2007 at 11:54 am
AMEN! I had similar things happen with 4-5 helpdesk tickets this morning…2.5 hours to do all of them, but the amount of time for each one varied widely. Sometimes it was just the person’s desktop being slow, sometimes it was researching a problem…I’m just happy they’re all up and running at 100%! Usually there’s “just one thing” left…now it’s just the rest of the open tickets I haven’t gotten to yet
When you get all of Granger’s tickets closed, want to stop by for a couple of weeks? 