The last three days have been hectic and stressful, and I'm really hoping tomorrow (... today) won't follow the same route! Getting back to work after a week away and discovering a bunch of ordinarily not-so difficult things to sort out - ordinarily. The combination of
a) the BMJ is (finally) ditching Lotus Notes, and going to use Google Apps for mail, calenders and so on - yay - but it's our deptartment that have taken the plunge and starting migrating first, just so we can spot all the problems and figure out how it all works when the non-techy people get it... There's plenty of things for us to deal with, but one thing is that all our emails and stuff from before 2013 aren't available and won't be for a month or more, so fingers crossed nobody will need anything sent or receieved before then!
b) ... like for instance all kinds of data or files I got years ago, and don't right now. I finally got a new desktop PC at work - the Friday before Wedface - which is so much better specced than the old one, but it needs tons of things installing, configuring, updating, fixing and/or finding alternatives; this is mostly due to the vast lack of stuff installed on it, and software not working under Windows 7.
So lots of the useful tools I've built up for doing my job and working on various projects isn't really in a fully-working state yet. It should have been an ongoing process of getting things back to normal, but IM&T (the hardware department) didn't put all of the stuff I backed up off of the old PC on my new one as they'd said - hundreds of megabytes of code, random apps and saved settings for all kinds of software. Which really cock-blocks doing any tasks which rely on that stuff being there - for instance, being able to upload things to our sites is handy! Generally even the things I can get done are harder and take longer to do.
No response so far this week about this, and I've been too busy to chase them so far.
c) coming back after a week away to a bunch of issues I need to sort out - nothing huge, but I was already loaded with stuff to do, and the issues were across lots of different projects that I've worked on in the past - so lots of not being able to do anything for lots of them because of b), deadlines for some along with the project manager phoning me every half-hour or so and making me lose focus again and get more stressed - and working on multiple things for multiple projects at once is always something my ADD doesn't make easy at the best of times.
d) just as I figure out how to fix one critical issue, I need to update my password at work, as it's expired. This happens every three months, I change it, log out of Windows, log back in again, and that's it done. Not yesterday! I changed it, logged out, and then could not get in again - no amount of retrying, resetting my home PC, trying my laptop instead, or even getting someone at work to reset the PC there, managed to fix it...
Great timing!
Got in today, still not working properly, I couldn't even log in at the machine - it seems ot think I already am, but also not on the BMJ network, and has frozen. Finally got to the desktop using Safe Mode, and that's what I used all today - hard to tell what it was that went wrong even with all the diagnosis tools on W7. Those that work in Safe Mode at least!
Getting stuff done in Safe Mode, on my new desktop, with most software needing installing and/or configuring, from a backup I don't have, and trying to keep everybody in the loop - AAAAAGH! Left around half ten this evening (!) and finally restarted the desktop as I left - maybe it'll all work this morning...
... yeah. that'll happen.
