Wednesday, February 01, 2006

"Natural Lemon Flavor" and 8 Hours is a Long Time When You Are Sick

I would like to find the person who decided that TheraFlu has a "natural lemon flavor". In my life I have never tasted a lemon that was ANYTHING like what TheraFlu tastes like. TheraFlu has to be the nastiest tasting medicine I have ever taken, but to be honest, it does a pretty good job of keeping my running during the day...just about as good as Dayquil, only TheraFlu tastes worse.

We did not buy the TheraFlu, it was given to us by a rep of the company that makes it as a "gift" for helping the homeless on Thanksgiving day a couple of years ago. We put most of it in the church med kit, but a few of the families took some with them for emergency use. I took mine and put it in my desk drawer at work. I took the last one today. I will now have six hours of relief from some of my symptoms.

Why am I blogging this? I have a cold. Imagine having a small incision made in your lower back, damaged tissue and bone cut away, sew it up, be forced to wear a restricting back brace for at least 4 weeks (Remember, I just had back surgery) and having a cold. Coughing in my condition is not fun. Trust me. I really went out of my way to make sure I stayed away from people who were sick, but one on my Christian brothers failed to inform me that his entire family had been battling cold and flu for weeks as he gave me a hug, shook my hand, and told me that it was good to see me up and about. He did not mean to pass this on and I hold no grudges, but this is not fun. I am attempting to put in 8 hours a day at my job and I am barely making it. Yesterday my TL told me to go home because I looked tired. I was, but I had so much to do. I managed to get out about 15-20 minutes early (which was not really early, considering I worked through half my lunch and logged in early from home to pull and distribute a report. So I guess I really did not leave early after all.

Work, while not hard, has been demanding. I spent two hours yesterday making 20 cables for my boss to be used on a project I was working on before my surgery. I am not sure if it is a "crossover" cable or not. It is 8 pin RJ-45, with pin 1 matching with pin 1, pin 8 matching with pin 8, and the 2-7 matching with pins 7-2 (make sense?). I have never made cables before, so this was interesting. The crimping tool was not in great shape and it was murder stripping the wires with it.

Before that little adventure, I was asked, excuse me, told to run a report on our ticket activity for the month. My boss, a nice guy really, is rather demanding and wants the reports a bit more complex than our current tool allows, so I have to massage the data quite a bit to get it where he wants it. That took about 2 hours...1 hour longer than it should, IMHO.

The rest of the day was spent investigating tickets, creating a list of suggestions for my boss on how to improve our department, and testing the latest version of our Linux images for the R&D machines. The process is not as smooth as the last version, but I have been told this will get better.

Today I am battling an Exchange server that is not responding and finishing up the tests of the Linux images. I am not sure what else I will need to do for my boss, but I am sure he will keep me busy.

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