Have you ever stopped in your tracks on your way to do something and realize just how many things you normally do that you’ve completely let slip because you’ve been so caught up in dozens of other things that need doing?

Yeah, I had one of those today. I managed to take care of part of one of those long-forgotten things (checking the anti-virus system!) but was pained to realize how many other things I’ve let slip thorugh the cracks. Bad SysAdmin, no donut. Le sigh.

This doesn’t mean I’m not glad it’s the weekend, mind you…

My penance for daring to take a day off of work this week, apparently, is to have one of the most unpleasant workdays in recent memory just beforehand. Printers, Microsoft patch shenanigans, projectors, and nuke-and-repave jobs were the order of the day. Not only that, but my wonderful Neuros portable music player seems to be nearing battery death. Argh!

The plan for this weekend is to relax as much as humanly possible. I enlisted some help this time, so wish us luck!

This sort of thing may not be why I love my job, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

I did something nice, and promptly, for the folks in the KGON studio. A few minutes later, this appeared on my desk!

Okay, so sure, I already had the first season on DVD. Er, and let’s not dwell on the fact that I also got that for free from the, er, radio station, albeit a few years ago. One also shouldn’t dwell on the fact that it was only available to plunk down on my desk because they ended up not giving it away to a listener. But dammit, I’ve been drooling over DVDs of the entire series for years, and that’s no small chunk of change, so I’m hardly one to quibble over insignificant details.

So, it’s true. Nobody, and I mean nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. I sure as hell didn’t!

It’s not even lunch hour and I’m already bewildered by the odd goings-on I’ve dealt with at the office so far today. Let’s see…

• Installing WinRAR on a production room PC and showing a morning show producer how to extract a multipart RAR file.
• Reinstalling CoolEdit 2000 on another production room PC, because for some reason the existing copy had forgotten that it’s licensed.
• Wrestling with a bizarre login error loop on a promotions manager’s laptop, then (for good measure) merging two iTunes music collections (and I don’t even want to know how she ended up with a divided library).
• Chasing down the source of a weird iTunes_Music directory on, of all things, the main Enco fileserver. Turns out to have been caused by the fact that one of our music directors has a computer with two optical drives (CD burner and DVD-ROM) which makes both the first “available” drive letter and the Enco server drive mapping, “F:”… and the iPod drive mounter isn’t smart enough to notice that the drive letter’s already in use.

And now, I think, it’s just about time for lu—

Nevermind. My phone just rang. Someone in cubeland can’t get on the Web…

I made it work, alright. I cheated a bit here and there, but what I ended up with was an end-user experience that is wholly identical to that which our airstaff have been used to for years now in addition to reintroducing a feature that some of our airstaff have been lamenting the loss of for months now.

Because I’m just that good, I tell you.

I’m glad tomorrow’s the end of my work week, however. It’s been a long week for such a short week…

You’ve heard this one, I’m sure: “Lack of preparedness on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Whoops, I’m terribly sorry. It turns out that lack of preparedness on someone else’s part does, in fact, constitute an emergency on my part. This afternoon I enjoyed the dubious pleasure of running around dealing with the fact that Metro Networks changed the entire website delivery system for up-to-the-minute traffic info… and didn’t tell anyone beforehand. Just one short email with the new URL, instructions and (it turns out) new passwords would have saved me all sorts of stress.

Oh, yeah. They insisted at first that the “current” passwords would work fine. Bzzzzt.

Then I find out that their new website looks like crap in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. In one, the text is too big and the text window too small, so one has to scroll sideways to read an entire line of text. In the other, the text window is black text on a black background. That’s rather useless, wouldn’t you agree? The solution in both browsers is to click on a tiny, unlabeled icon that launches the text document itself in a dedicated window, nicely unformatted for ease of use.

The entire new system is so counterintuitive as to be nigh-useless, and I fully expect phone calls tomorrow morning from show producers and air talents who’re confused and upset. I won’t be able to blame them one bit, either.

So in among all of the other fun stuff going on right now (do the names Sarbanes and Oxley ring any bells?) I get to find a geek-fu solution to this little nightmare. Wonderful.