Voenix Rising

It’s been an interesting few days at work.

It started Saturday night. For some godforsaken reason, I decided to log in to my work account to check email. (Yeah, I was that bored.) That was my first mistake. When I attempted to get into the webmail portal, it kept returning, “bad account name or password.” Thinking I’d fat-fingered it, I attempted to log into VPN. That returned, “account disabled.”

Okay, I’d definitely fat-fingered it and locked myself out. I gave it fifteen minutes to allow it to reset and tried again. Same result. Not overly concerned—but with memories of how I was unceremoniously let go from ADOT starting to dance in my head—I went to bed and decided to just wait until morning to try it again.

Sunday morning rolled around and I still couldn’t get in. Having worked myself up into a panic, I texted my supervisor and asked if something had happened to my employment status I was unaware of. There was no response.

Several hours later, and now in full panic mode with visions of the six months of unemployment hell I went through last year now doing a full-on rave in my head, I called the boss…and got his voicemail.

He called me back an hour or so later and assured me that nothing had changed and that I’d probably locked myself out. (He was in fact a little taken back that I’d even consider that they’d summarily dismissed me like that.)

Finally calmed down, I enjoyed the rest of the weekend and headed into work Monday.

Arriving at work, my account was still disabled. Fortunately my boss was there and when he went in to look at my account, he said, “That’s odd. It’s showing you’ve been termed.” Apparently all of us who originally came in under this one particular contract had been termed—even though I was technically no longer a part of that group, or even working in that department any more.

As I overheard a few of my supervisor’s phone calls to the main I.T. department, I thought, “This is what barely-but-well controlled anger sounds like.” While it took nearly all day—and several more phone calls—to get my full access restored, everything was back to normal by the end of the day, and they’d basically paid me for sitting around for 8 hours looking pretty.

I came in Tuesday morning and it was a full-on repeat of the day before. “Account Disabled. See your Administrator” was my greeting when attempting to log into my computer.

So apparently someone else in the I.T. food chain decided to take it upon themselves and complete the tickets to have our accounts termed. This time it took nearly a day of phone calls—and more than a few supervisory visits to Human Resources—to get it fixed. At one point I could log in, but it showed my name as “Termed” and I had no access to anything. Then I couldn’t log in at all. Then my separate administrator account that allows me to do big boy things stopped working…

Since I had access to absolutely nothing and to prevent the impression they were paying me to look pretty two days in a row, I suggested that I spend the day cleaning up the computer lab, a room that’s become a dumping ground for old equipment and a project we’ve been discussing for months but never had the time to start.

By the end of the day, I gave up trying to log in, because nothing had changed from the morning. For some reason this time it had to wait until overnight processing to be fixed.

Fortunately, yesterday morning everything was back to normal and I was able to get back to my regularly scheduled duties. But seriously… the level of incompetence was astounding.

What did I learn from this?

(1) There is absolutely no reason for me to check work email on the weekend and (2) I really need to start socking all the “extra” money I’m making from this gig away…just in case.