Week in My Life: Tuesday

For my second day of participating in Adventuroo‘s project, I decided to capture what my day at work was like.   I work for a university and if you’ve ever had the buring desire to know what I do at work, your wish is about to be granted.  I wear a few different hats.  I manage a group that is responsible for maintaining out Customer Relationship Management system and all the data it contains, including stakeholder reporting responsibilities.  My group is also in charge of all of our web presences, both internal and external, so I work very closely with marketing.  I also manage our social media presences because it’s fun.  So one foot in IT, one foot in marketing and a pinky in social media.  It all sort of makes sense.

It was raining on the way to work and my fellow commuters were driving as if they’d never seen rain before, so I was a little stressed because Tuesday and Thursday are Daniel’s preschool days, and I meet MIL a little earlier so that she can give him breakfast before she takes him to preschool.  Thankfully, I was only a few minutes late when I met her. I drove down the street to the lot across from my building and sprinted inside so I wouldn’t get wet (because my umbrella is never where I need it to be).

My building. My office is on the second floor behind the tree on the right.

Before Noon

I checked my email and sent emails to a few of our regional managers about some client news that had appeared in my news alerts overnight.  I tweeted about one of them from my organization’s account.  The rest of the morning was spent making content updates to our various websites.  We recently installed a new CMS and public website, and we’re still working out the kinks.

My office

My office

And I drank coffee.  I’ve recently gotten in to the habit of taking a small thermos and a big mug of coffee with me.  I drink some on the way to work and throughout the morning, but I’m done by about 10am.  After that, I can’t drink coffee for the rest of the morning.  If I were to have coffee again, it would have to be in the afternoon.  It’s bizarre, but to me it seems like there is a point in the morning at which I must stop drinking coffee.  Yeah, I’m weird.

My coffee mugs

Normally I have several meeetings throughout the week, but I had only one today, which was good because I have some projects to finish up. I also have a cold this week and a joy to be around, so I’m grateful to be able to spare my coworkers my sunny disposition.  My meeting was at 11:30 and primarily focused on discussing content for that group’s section of the website.  In the course of the meeting, I discovered that two of the participants had new laptops and could no longer use a key database.  I fervently hoped that this problem would be easily fixed by IT tweaking some setting in Access.

Lunch

I brought leftover chili from home, but I decided to go to the Wendy’s a few minutes away to get a side salad to go with it.  I broke a nail in the process, which sucks because now I have to trim all my fingernails since the broken nail is much shorter than the others. I almost always eat lunch at my desk and use that time to visit blogs, Babble, various message boards and other sites.   During that time a few coworkers stopped by with questions, which was a bit irritating but since I didn’t close my door, I guess I asked for it.

Side salad (being virtuous)

Chili. See the napkin? I'm using it as a big b/c I can be a sloppy eater. Better than on my shirt, right?

Afternoon

After lunch, one of our IT guys told me that it looked like the problem with the Access database tool was due to the fact that it wasn’t compatible with Access 2010, which they had been loading on the new computers.  GREAT!  This was pretty much my worst nightmare.  I hate standalone Access databases because important data is not centralized.  Plus, what usually happens is that the person who designed the tool leaves at some point and it becomes someone else’s problem (usually mine) to maintain and fix.  One of my group’s priorities is to migrate this tool to a web-based tool, but it looks like the priority level just increased because this tool is used by a lot of people.  I might have said a bad word, and I definitely thought nasty things the tool’s developer, who as you might have guessed, no longer works here.

The afternoon called for music, so I plugged in my headphones and did some coding on another project and started to study the layout of the infernal Access database.  I also Skyped with a coworker, which is funny because her office is next door to mine.  The walls in my building are paper thin, and we can hear each other typing the Skype messages.  Ah, technology. How lazy it makes us.

Music time!

Database fun

Ready to go home

5pm comes and since it is raining, I drive to the parking deck to get Daniel and see the art he made in preschool that day.  He’s full of energy, but I am not, and we drive home to see J who stayed home sick.

Meeting Daniel, Grandma and Great-Grandma in the parking deck

Sweet Boy!

Preschool scarecrow!

Thus ends my Tuesday at work.

Thoughts on the process

• It’s really difficult to make what I do at work all day sound remotely interesting.
• It’s really difficult to think of interesting photo ops of my work day
• Both of my WIML posts really reiterate how little time I get to spend with Daniel during the work week 😦
• I need to have more info about J in my posts too