The Day Everything Went Wrong

It started off well. I finally had a plan to tackle the laundry list of things I needed to do at work. I was ready to organize myself to take on a workload that, in the old days, would have been divvied amongst a whole team. I had an all-day meeting to play in the background, keeping those would be "Just a minute of your time" calls that eat up half an hour at bay. I was actually motivated for this.

I should have known better.

Motivation, a goal, a plan… starting a day off with those three coming together is a recipe for trouble on any day. But today isn't just any day. It is Tuesday.

The Dream

It started as soon as I sat down at my desk, knuckles cracked, steam rising from my second cup of coffee. My goal was simple: Organize all of the work I have so I can plan it out and give reasonable timelines to people. This involved mapping out two areas:

1. For the various massive projects I have, break them down into Milestones and then in to major tasks. I didn't need every single little step; I just needed enough that I could get a proper sizing of them.
2. For the thousand little things I need to do, I needed to write them all down and then mark whether they were one-offs, or repeating tasks. If they are one-offs, then I would just do them. But if they repeat: automate.

Simple enough of an idea, even if the projects are complex. And by putting a system into place, knowing where everything was going to be saved for each project and task, I would be well-positioned for anything new that came up.

Then, Tuesday hit.

The Reality

I don't know what it is about Tuesdays, but in the 25+ years that I have been working in IT, Tuesdays always seem to be the day that everything goes wrong. Fridays at 4:00PM are another dangerous time, but that seems to be more for developers.

As I began to focus, the messages started to arrive… someone needs access to this system, another can't deploy their agent to test, a third needs even more permissions in a platform… their notifications conveniently popping up over the most inconvenient locations on my screen.

…I should have known.

Ideally I would just ignore these interruptions and focus on what I need to do. But there is an undeniable truth when you work in IT: A small issue to you can be a really big issue to someone else.

So I paused what I was doing to try and help where I could. And this is where Tuesday reared its ugly head. You see, it is one thing when you are interrupted to take care of a small task such as adding someone to a security group so they can access a system. It is another when you wind up spending hours trying to troubleshoot why it is that person still cannot access that system after you added them to the group. And that is what I spent much of my day on…

The Nightmare

Imagine you are in charge of doing task X, and all you need to do to complete task X is to press this one big button. So, you press the button, except nothing happens. So you press it again. Still nothing. You press it a few more times thinking maybe you pressed it wrong… I mean, you have pressed this button a hundred times before and it worked, but maybe you did it wrong? No, that can't be. After all, you have been pressing buttons like this for years. You trained for for this, you built a career around being able to press the button, yet… nothing. No warnings, no errors, no logs, nothing.

…Then, Tuesday hit.

You start to do research into why it is the button isn't working when you push it. You look through support materials, comb through community sites, scour blogs to see if anyone else is suffering this same sense of self doubt because their button did nothing when they pushed it. You even turn to your trusty AI agent assistant, describing the issue in as much detail as you can, only to receive the much more polite and perhaps sightly verbose version of "I don't know, Dave… have you tried rebooting?" that you used to give to others over the phone as you rolled your eyes at how ignorant and stupid they sounded…

Eventually you are left with know choice but to submit the dreaded "vendor support ticket". Cringing as you enter in the details of what has transpired up to this point, full of feelings of abject failure and an intense desire to retire and go work selling seashell necklaces on the beach.

…there is an undeniable truth when you work in IT: A small issue to you can be a really big issue to someone else.

All the while, more requests for help are coming in. And each system you touch seems to spontaneously combust in some fashion. Crashing, random vague or nonsensical errors, or suddenly deciding to "just not work".

And as you finally arrive towards the end of the day and the coffee has gone cold, you feel the hair on your head a little thinner, your mind a little dimmer, and your energy and will to continue all but evaporated. And as you are about to close your laptop in total defeat for the day, you receive an email back from the vendor about your ticket. It reads:

"We looked into your issue and it appears it is a bug in our application. We have added to our backlog to fix. Thank you for reporting it."

In that moment, you sigh. Anyrage you feel towards that vendor for all of the time you lost and frustration you felt is offset by exhaustion and the relief of knowing that it actually wasn't you. It was just a broken button.

The Hope

That was my day today. It isn't the first Tuesday this has happened, and I am certain it won't be the last. Tuesdays always seem to be the day in which technology failures coalesce around. I have come to expect this of Tuesdays, though I have never grown used to them.

As I powered down my computer and glanced at the tattered ruins of my goals, hopes, and dreams, only one thought came to my head:

"At least tomorrow is Wednesday."