Complacency

Have you ever realized how much of our day depends on things we have customized to our particular whims? Or how much inconvenience it causes when those customizations are removed? It turns your smooth daily routine into a drive over a road that's full of foot-deep potholes!

In the way of explanation, I offer a review of my morning...so far:

For the past month or so, the IT department of my company has been telling me that my cubicle's desktop has some thing fatally wrong with its hard drive and that it would die spectacularly eventually. They also kept telling me that they would have to replace it with a new comp and that I should let them know a good time to do it. Well, I told them to do it while I was in Vegas, didn't happen. How about while I'm on one of my daily lunch breaks, it was only supposed to take an hour and I always leave for lunch at least an hour before IT takes its collective lunch break. (Side rant: That's always a fun hour when something goes wrong with the server/system/network and the entire IT team is off getting a burger somewhere) Nope...so, yesterday, I was out sick with a migraine. Which btw, SUCK!!!!

Perfect time I will agree...IT backs up (mostly) my desktop files, favorites, documents etc and swaps out PCs. I come in this morning still feeling slightly below the weather to discover I have a new PC. GREAT! Till I sit down. First off, the CPU is and always has been mounted below my desk. However, the old one was vertically mounted at the edge of the desk by the cubicle wall. This new one is horizontally mounted about 3 inches from the wall. Not too much but it now intrudes into the air space normally occupied by my thigh. This will take some getting used to.

Next, the keyboard is smaller, more streamlined. This doesn't make much of a difference to me honestly, but I was used to just laying my pen on the ledge above the function keys. That ledge doesn't exist anymore, a fact I did not recognize until while on the phone with a fellow vendor I laid my pen down and it rolled under the keyboard. D'OP!

Then we get to how many programs we take for granted. Like, JAVA. One of the multiple inventory lists I routinely check uses a JAVA pop up box. I go to check it and I get that great little invention the invalid plug in X. *groan* download JAVA, restart browser. Back to work.

Now, while in this pop up, Tab doesn't work, but I had mapped a key to act as a tab. Therefore, I am used to breezing through the various fields I either ignore or use the default settings. Apparently, key maps don't transfer. *groan again* Remap keys.

Ya know, my Outlook inbox has been strangely empty this morning. *shrugs* It's Friday, I was out yesterday and I had set up an auto-reply from my home PC that informed anyone who tried to contact me that I was out and to contact one of the other agents so I know I didn't have any inventory offers out there waiting for my attention. Still, it's strange that I haven't gotten any of the general info stuff. Co-worker asks if I got their email, I say, "What email?"

"The one I sent you (Duh, here's your sign Rogue.)"

I check, box is still empty...I hit send/receive. BOOM! Fifty or so emails come pouring in. Apparently, I was missed. Oh yeah, I had set Outlook to run an auto send/receive every minute (in my job, minutes can me the diff between getting a unit and not). That didn't transfer either. *groan* Reset.

But the most annoying...my play lists. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Yeah, my music transferred, (thank god!) as did the lists, but apparently something didn't because when I tried to activate one, I get the "file not found" error. So I have to go back in and remap the path, well, try to remap it. Turned out to be easier to just erase the broken ones and reload the lists.

Yeah, I admit it. I'm lazy and whining. Not a single one of these inconveniences took longer than a minute or two to fix, except the CPU mounting...still working on a solution to that one. But that's what they are, inconveniences. Little things that don't matter a hill of snot yet seem determined to drive you crazy!

We get lazy, we get complacent...we are creatures of habit and routine after all. When that routine gets disrupted, the effects are rarely pleasant.

At least my Internet browser favorites list transferred, though apparently, IE didn't like the way I had them organized and alphabetized them. *final groan*

This concludes today's rant, we now return you to your regularly scheduled slacking off.