Ever had one of those days where you think it would have been better just to stay in bed ? Well I can't really spend too long on that, because that's exactly what I did yesterday. So today proves that even if you do stay in bed, you're still stuffed.
First thing was upon arriving at the tube station I was planning to charge up my Oystercard with a weekly ticket, hop on the tube, and get to work in the nick of time, thus impressing everyone with what an efficient and effective team member I am (given that the only metric people seem to use in deciding who good employees are is what time your arse is in the seat). Luckily for me, there was no way this was going to happen, because a girl had fed a fiver into the machine. The machine had gobbled the fiver and then pretended like nothing had happened, and the girl was just beginning to raise the alert when I turned up.
The girl accosted the London Underground Staff Member (luckily, somehow, she managed to find one), who then in turn left the serving window and rummaged around in the back of the machine. This move was checkmate for the rest of us, meaning there was no way we could pay for our tickets over the counter either. After a mere 20 minutes the issue was somehow resolved, the machine was accepting cards again, and my 10 second transaction could take place. Admittedly in 20 mins I could've walked to Warren Street, sorted it out there & hopped on the tube, but of course you never know it's going to take as long as it does. I don't know why the girl with (or more accurately, without) the fiver was apologising to everyone – it's not like it was *her* machine that was an unreliable P.O.S.
Arriving at work, there was still the ugly spectre of an error floating about. I'd spent a fair bit of time bughunting it on Monday, to no avail. What was going on was that *something* was happening in the system (triggered by what, we didn't know) which would assign all of the cases in the workflow system to one user. This means that everyone else using the system loses their work. No real big issue, except that the 3 times it happened it turned out that the user the cases were assigned to was one of mine. This immediately placed me as the primary suspect.
I spent about a half a day poring through code to find the source, but then it happened again yesterday while I was off sick, which meant I was off the hook – turns out it was the lads in Dublin doing something totally separate, hence why we couldn't see the correlation between what we were doing and what could have caused it. Yee haa.
I've completely forgotten where this was leading, but that's indicative of how today's been, really. I'm going to stop writing now.