A bad case of the Mondays

You know how Monday has the reputation for being a bad day? Well, my Monday started last Friday. And it's still going, even though today is Wednesday. Just all the little bits of stupid crap that accumulate into a huge pile that you can't step around. I finally broke down and bought a new Palm earlier this month. I figured that it would not be worth the hassle of trying to get approval from IT to get one from work (my boss is important enough to get one, since he's management, but the admin support? not so much) It's just the basic model, a Zire 21, 'cause I don't need much. Just a calendar that I can synchronize with my GroupWise appointments so I can keep track of my work schedule. Yeah, sounds easy enough. Except that the Hot Sync manager won't work. Two IT guys at work have worked on it, no dice. It's fine if one of them is logged on to my laptop, but as soon as I log on, it won't recognize the USB connection and I get an error message that says that the connection cannot be established. No kidding. No connection can be established. Well, maybe that's because the flipping software doesn't register that there's a damned USB connection! No connection. Lovely. So, on Friday we threw up our hands and I called Palm support. You would think that the help desk technicians at Palm would be familiar with the Palm products and would, you know, HELP. You'd think, but you'd be wrong. The first technician told me I was taking too long to reboot and told me to call back when my PC was up and running. The second told me to download the instructions from the website for loading the USB drivers and to call back when I was done. The directions didn't work. The third technician kept asking me to tell him what I saw on the screen whenever I clicked where he told me to, but didn't like my answers: Techncian: Right click where it says "Palm Handheld." What are your choices? Me: "Scan for hardware changes" or "Properties." Technician: No, what does it say when you right click on "Palm Handheld"? Me: It says "Scan for hardware changes" and it says "Properties" Technician: No, when you right click where it says Palm Handheld it will give you some choices. What are the choices? So, I gave up until Monday. On Monday I tried again. The technician (the fourth one, if you're keeping score) led me through the same steps as the first two did, then disconnected me in the middle of a sentence. The next one (lucky #5) told me, in a nice slow condescending voice, that Windows has some security measures that only allow people with a-d-m-i-n-i-s-r-t-a-t-i-v-e rights to install hardware and software and that since I did not have all the rights, I couldn't do it. I explained that someone with full administrative rights installed the hardware, and that I had admin rights to install the software. I explained again how everything was working when the admin installed the hardware and software, but that the hardware was not being recognized when I logged on. He said that only people with (follow me folks, that can be really hard for us peons to understand) administrative rights can install software and that just because someone with administrative rights works on my computer, that doesn't give me administrative rights. Only certain people have the rights, you see, not anyone who uses the computer. When I explained to him (again) that the hardware was installed by someone with administrative rights, and that the hardware was tested and worked just fine until I signed on, he disconnected me. I called back a few hours later, spoke to a whole new technician (I wonder if 6 is the record?), who spent 45 mintues on the phone with me and talked me though some new stuff that still did not work. So, she bumped me to a level 2 technician, saying I would get a call back within 24 hours. That was at 2:47 pm on Monday. It is currently 4:49 on Wednesday, and I have not heard back. I'm off to pick up the kidlets, since I am single mommy this week (DH being in Minnesoota until Sunday night) and they need to get home and eat. continued... Man, it's amazing how three people so small can make me so tired in so little time. The kids were home with DH on Monday, as is normal for this summer, but because FIL needed to have some tests done on Tuesday, we had to change the Tuesday schedule and take the munchkins to Mom's. In order to allow DH to get to work on time on Monday night, I had to cut out early from the office. How nice that the kids behaved all day for their daddy-o, since that left them with all sorts of energy to be beastly for Mommy!! It only took me 5 tries to get DS1 to stay in the bed. And I totally forgot it was trash night until I was ready to go to bed, so I was running around at the last minute gathering it all up (although I didn't put it out, due to the deluge of rain that we had.) I never did find the rented DVD that DS1 decided to hide- I even called DH on his cell to ask him if he'd seen it. (He said he had, but when I looked where he said he put it, it wasn't there.) When hubby got home (1:00ish), he woke me up with his packing (nothing like waiting until the last minute to get ready to leave-- it's not like he'd known about his travel plans for ages...) Good news is that he found the DVD- it was on a shelf way above the children's reach, amongst the DVDs we own. Hmmmm. Wonder how it got there. It took about an eon to get to Mom's on Tuesday morning, thanks to some accidents along the way (none involved us, most didn't even happen on our route, but we got stuck in bail out traffic) but I finally made it to work half an hour later than intended. And was greeted within 20 minutes by someone who had asked my boss if I could assist with a meeting later in the day. Of course he said yes. He's such a team player, I gotta say, volunteering me to take notes in another department's 2 hour meeting. (He means well. Really. But it just went along nicely with my week from Hell.) Actually, the meeting didn't end up being 2 hours. It ended up being 2 hours and 35 minutes. I swear, after awhile even the most interesting meetings can start to sound like I'm listening to the grown-ups in the Charlie Brown cartoons (wonkwonkwonkwonkwonk). There was a Carpenters (I think, or maybe Helen Reddy) song in the 70s about rainy days and Mondays- as if my three-days-of-Monday wasn't enough, the incessant rain continued this morning. I overslept some, didn't get my butt out of bed until 5:00, but I managed to get the dog fed and out, myself showered and dressed (fully matched and everything!) and all three kids out the door on time. Once I managed to get to the office (still on time, amazingly) I got grabbed into a meeting with my boss and a few of the department directors. They were discussing the notes from the mondo-expert meeting a few weeks ago, and instead of just giving me the revisions they wanted they thought it would be good for me to participate in the discussion. Oh joy. Ah, but there is hope for the end of Monday! The sun came out, and we had ice cream at work this afternoon. Mocha almond fudge can even make up for the miracles that my boss has asked me to perform (I'm supposed to set up a two hour meeting, including lunch, with about 10 people early next week. One of those people-the one expected to run the meeting- only has a 3.5 hours of cumulative time available next week. And there is no conference room available. But, once again, I must find a way to violate the laws of time and space to make this happen. I guess that's why they pay me the big bucks. Oh, wait...)