April 21, 2005
Dear Everyone:
So what happened to last week’s Letter?
I was under quarantine.
The week before last, you will remember, there was no Letter because I was returning from a business trip to “Hobby”. The following Saturday, April 9th, I met “Jeannie” at our hairdresser’s place. I had a slight cough, which I recognized instantly. It was my “autumn allergy” cough. It seemed a little odd, it showing up in April; but I figured we’ve been having such a lush spring that the greenies and the growies were having a field day tossing pollen and whatnot into the air. And that’s probably all it was.
Until I got home Monday night, coughing a lot, with a screaming headache, and thinking how much I was looking forward to a hot bath because all of my muscles were hurting and I was so cold. It was 73 degrees in the living room.
Then it struck me: Cough; headache; muscle ache; chills/fever. These were the classic symptoms of the flu. The same flu we couldn’t get immunization shots for last October because of a sudden shortage. And I had said at the time that, if I did come down with the flu, I would take the opportunity to stay home and watch an epic TV series on DVD.
Nevertheless, I decided to adopt a “wait and see” policy. On Tuesday, I got up as usual and considered the situation. Yes, I was coughing, but I didn’t feel all that cruddy; so I started getting ready to go to work. In fact, I was just beginning to put on makeup when I realized, “Stop! Wait! This is wrong! It’s not about you, it’s about all those other people. If you go into work, you’ll be exposing everyone you see to the flu.”
So I took my temperature, which by now was a shade below 100. Nope. Not going in today. I called a friend whose cell phone number was programmed into my cell phone. I needed her to look up my supervisor’s phone number; we had moved to new offices less than a month before and I hadn’t had time to learn what his new number was. I got his voicemail and left a message that I was “keeping myself home today.”
After that things got progressively worse. I will spare you the details. But I really didn’t feel up to writing a Letter last Thursday. And who wants to read about how sick I was at the time?
In other news…
Those delightful developers for our electronic document management system have gone and done it again. They’ve taken change management and deftly turned it into crisis management.
They’ve known for weeks, possibly months, that they were planning to release a new version of the software. But only this Tuesday did they happen to mention that all of the 2000+ Users of the system would be required to download and configure another application in order for the new version to work properly.
Had we known in advance, we could have prepared a “package” that Users would only need to click on and the download, configure, clean up the little messes that follow would be done automatically. But no, now there wasn’t time.
So yesterday I threw together a “brief” (16 pages) set of step-by-step instructions, complete with illustrations, to show the most technically challenged User how to get to the application and what to do next. Then today, I kept waiting for someone to give me the go-ahead to send it out to all the Users. Until I realized that every single one of the technical staff were in an all-day meeting.
So I sent it out on my own this afternoon. Shortly after, I got an email from someone I know in “Pleasant Hill”. It read, in effect, “Usually, when we get something from the technical people, it reads like gibberish. Those were the easiest instructions I ever had to follow. Thank you.”
That, and the fact that for the first time since I got sick, I feel positively human, made my day.
Love, as always,
Pete
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