Some days you should never get out of bed

I'm not saying today was the worst day possible, but I guess you could say getting woken up with a call from 6,000 miles away to diagnose a technical problem certainly isn't a good start. Having to debug a licensing issue on one of my company's products, only made me late for my 9 AM conference call, which I had to join from the car on my way to work (instead of doing it in the office). Of course, the phone number I had to conference into was typed incorrectly in the e-mail, so I had to make a few calls to get the right number before I could even join the call.

The conference call as it turned out was with an irate reseller, and was basically a nice session to let him make complaints at myself and another co-worker. In case you haven't let someone just yell at you for an hour, trust me, it's not a fun event.

This conference call was immediately followed up by a meeting with engineers about a project that I've been trying to get built for the last year, and is about 6-9 months behind schedule. More product compromises, and I had to give in and agree to cutting back more features.

I then had a quick Jamba Juice lunch with another co-worker, Chris, who's another long time employee like myself. We talked about the fact that one of the founders of our company is leaving. There are so few employees left who've been at the company longer than I have.

This was followed by a meeting where we discussed company strategy, something that I've been following very closely, as I've been product manager for one of the key products in our company strategy. The discussion included topics like completely getting out of the product line I'd worked so hard to get out the door. It's like talking about getting rid of your own child!

In between these meetings all day, I had to setup some equipment for a demo I've been asked to give next Tuesday (I only found out about this yesterday). I told everyone I needed to pull the components of the demo together today, so I'd have time to familiarize myself with the components. Basically I have to demo three products which I've never seen or touched before. Generally not a good idea, if you don't familiarize yourself with the products first, when the demos are using pre-production software.

By 2pm I was of course sweating bullets over the fact I hadn't gotten anything from anyone. I finally got some equipment around 4pm, and a software build around 6pm, and had to run out to Fry's to get some more equipment. Of course it's around 9:30 pm now on a Friday night, and I've still not got the pieces I need working. It turns out in my haste to get this installed, I grabbed the wrong software build. How embarrassing to have to find this out in an e-mail to a dozen people.

I've essentially wasted a few hours because of a stupid mistake I made by not looking close enough at what I was downloading. So now I'm waiting for instructions on how to fix my own mistake. Is this day over yet?

The good news if there is any is that I've only got to get through 2 hours more, and then tomorrow, I get to see Su fen, Annette, Amelia and Daniel. They're camping tonight in Saratoga at Sanborn county park. Wish me luck!