rush hour

When I left my last job for this one, I was thinking I’d be moving ‘off the radar’. I was to be in an ‘entry-level’ IT security position working with a team of 3 others who were siginificantly higher than ‘entry-level’. I thought “hey, this is great, I’ll sit in my cube, make some pretty drawings and go home at the end of the day” ..

Boy was I wrong!

I’m driving to work today in serious rush hour traffic when my pager starts beeping at me. Its my manager, paging me from his off-site manager’s meeting because he was paged for a ‘priority 2’ issue with a system that I alone support. He shouldn’t have gotten paged before me — he’s third on the list, and I’m second. But I never got the page, and apparently, our first level never responded. Manager’s not too happy.

Yay.

Manager told the resolution center that we’d update them in 30 minutes, which, by the end of our conversation, meant that I had like 20 minutes to get to work, figure out what’s what and call the RC with some information. And I’m stuck in traffic – I mean, we’re crawling.

Yay.

I start scrambling. The only phone number I have with me is for one of my team members who’s generally in the office before me. Coworker R doesn’t know anything about this system, but he can at least give me some information and maybe call the RC with status if needed. So, I call. And I get voicemail. I give him a couple minutes, and I call again. And I get voicemail again. And traffic is still crawling.

Yay.

Ok .. so, here’s me … 6 weeks into the job, and I don’t have a clue what to do. I don’t even have the main office number to call the receptionist and have her start looking for people. Thankfully, while I’m frantically trying to figure out my next move, coworker R pages me from home. Traffic had started moving a bit and I’m starting to feel optimisitc. As I’m trying to read his phone number from the pager and put it into the cell phone, however, I glance up and realize that traffic isn’t moving quite like I thought it was … in fact, traffic ahead is stopped. This means I have to stop – quickly.

Yikes.

In a panic, I hit the brakes, and the ridiculously heavy cisco router on my front seat flys forward and takes out my ashtray that was hanging open. In the spirit of me, I yell “FUCK!” as I reach down to pick up the router. No real harm done, I stopped in time and only my ashtray is damaged. I sigh and then redial coworker R and get the scoop from him on this p2 ticket. Thanks to R for telling the RC that we’d update them at 11:00.

Schwew!

I’m starting to get my calm back after R decides to add the remote access group to the ticket, taking some heat off of us. Still somewhat jumbled in the brain and thinking about the issue while I’m talking to R on the cellphone, I notice the dude in the white pickup truck in front of me has gotten out of his truck and is yelling at me. Throwing up his hands and saying “what’s your fuckin problem?” and other similar intelligent phrases.

Excuse me??

This dude has gotten out of his vehicle during rush hour on the bussiest express way in all of Michigan to yell at me for getting too close to his truck during stop and go traffic? Is this guy for real? By now, traffic ahead had moved on, and he’s there alone, stopping traffic behind me, yelling. I just throw up my hands in a ‘what the fuck’ kind of motion. Eventually, he gets back in his truck and acts like a dick for awhile – you know, driving slow in the left lane, trying to piss me off.

This guy has no idea how completely insignificant he is to me right now.

Finally, I get to work, 25 minutes late. It took me less than 20 minutes to fix the problem and close the ticket. Thanks to rush hour, however, the ticket was open for more than an hour.

Yesterday, I left my house 15 minutes later than I did today and I got to work 15 minutes earlier than I did today. *sigh* I hate rush hour.