The suckiest week...

I've been on the road this week. The company put me on a project where we are installing our new Drive-thru timer product in a bunch of (name deleted, but they have pretty good roast beef sandwiches) stores. This is a pilot project, meaning we expect problems to occur and to have to resolve them, taking extra time to do so. I'm in charge of the software installation and configuration, and the company that we contract the hardware part to sent along a nice fellow to travel with me and hang all the monitors and run the wires. Unfortunately, we allowed the other company to schedule the travel, and so we are doing 4 stores in 4 days in 4 different states. We started by flying on Sunday to Richardson, Texas, working a 12 hour day on Monday, then flew to Indianapolis.

On Tuesday, we were supposed to install a store, then drive 6 hours to Middleburg Heights, Ohio to install a store on Wednesday. Instead, the other company asked us to install a second store in Indianapolis (one that had not had a site survey, so we didn't know what to expect). We protested, but they had of course already committed to the customer, so we had to do it (what are our opinions worth, anyway?). Well, as you might expect, we ran into serious problems. We had disconnected the existing system, so there was no going back, and no way we could leave until we had it resolved. We ended up on the phone to the programmer and developer until 2 am. Driving to Ohio wasn't possible, so we checked back into our original hotel and slept for 6 hours and hit the road the next day.

We got to Middleburg Heights at 4pm and ran into more problems. I couldn't get the Win2000 back office PC to connect to the SQL database on the WinXP drive-thru PC. We have run into this before and after wrestling with it for about a half hour, it tends to miraculously give in and connect. Not this time (of course). I spent another couple of hours on the phone trying to resolve it, and this time we had to give up. We got on the road at 11:30pm and drove about half the distance to the next site by 2am and got a hotel to catch some sleep. We cancelled our flights home, as there is no chance to get to Baltimore by 5pm. I called Hertz and told them we'd be driving all the way back to Charlotte and I'd return the rental car there.

Luck was with us, though. My wife found us flights back to Charlotte from Harrisburg, PA, which is just 30 minutes away from the job site in Shrewsbury.

Today, we got up at 7am and drove 4 hours to Shrewsbury, PA. At last, we had an install go easy! We got there at 11am and got the install finished by 3pm. Now I'm sitting at the airport in Harrisburg (there's a free wireless hotspot!!!) waiting to go home. I'll get back to Charlotte at 11-something, and I'm ABSOLUTELY NOT going to work tomorrow.

Add it up, and I worked (driving included) 68 hours this week in 5 days. This doesn't include air travel time. Putting it another way - I've averaged about 5 hours of sleep each night, and those are the only hours I wasn't working or travelling, so (5 x 24)-20= 100 hours of work. I'm going to sleep all day tomorrow.