A good day gone bad ain’t fun at all.

Ever thought that, maybe, just maybe, today would be a good day? Nothing fancy, just plain ole good. But you know that’s not true…

Work seems to be going on fine with nary a complaint from an irate customer 8000km away. Your colleagues are relaxed and don’t seem to bother whether or not you’re on bloody Facebook, and in particular, checking out their friends’ friends. Heck, even the lady who serves you your food is actually smiling at you even though you told her last minute that you don’t want prawns with your noodles but would like a little bit more chicken.

Just when you thought nothing could go wrong, something happens. Something that makes you wish you had left earlier instead of hanging around in the office only to be swamped with last minute work and potentially a bad end to an otherwise great day.

That was my last Friday’s experience. Could it be that there was some cosmic conspiracy to make portents of Friday the 13^th truly come true? If so, I must’ve been included in the list of Let’s Punk this Mere Mortal. Firstly, I committed what is considered a cardinal sin in my chosen profession: I forgot to turn on the fridge. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

The fridge was already turned on when I got in. Hee!

So the real story goes like this: I came in the first shift, did my normal system checks and tried to run the daily reports. Couldn’t perform the latter due to a technical glitch which resulted in the network having limited connectivity. Still following? Cool. So I thought, “What a nice day! I’m gonna home and make love to my woman, or at least, make her a nice low-carb dinner.” (Neither scenario happened. I don’t cook.) I get an instant message from my UK boss, asking me to check on something I worked on earlier in the morning. It was the dastardly fridge’s temperature setting that I forgot to turn back on! It turns out that I forgot to do this one very important thing and without going into much detail, I got screwed. Royally.

And the next thing I know, BAM! I get a holler from the Helpdesk team notifying me of something I and my team should’ve been notified of first! But, no, we were literally the last to know because our counterpart from the land of dour tea and crumpets forgot to include us in the email list. Whoop de doo de friggin’ do. Because of the delay, there I was with my colleague, the two of us rushing to get the reports sent out by 12 p.m. UK time. It was already 10 a.m. So it was a mad dash to manually generate the reports (the automatic generation failed in the morning), check them for any issues and then send out our own reports. We managed to get it done, though, there were a couple of reports missing but we did what we had to do and did it in good time.

The dust has settled and I now have a little yellow Post-it note reminding me to always turn on the temperature setting of a fridge.

So much for Friday the 13^th being a good day, huh?

This is Chris, signing off.

PS: I like treasure hunts. I just wish I was smarter in solving them, though!