View From the Bushes

Last night I figured that my only hope of finding the disk was the possibility that I had given it to my boss for safe keeping. He normally shows up by 8 am, but he was out sick yesterday and when there was no sign of him by around 8:20, I panicked and went and talked to my boss' boss, the CIO -- partially to check and see if my boss was coming in, and partially to get permission to ransack his cube if he wasn't. Well, getting permission to ransack his cube required telling the story, which of course prompted him to say that all software should be stored in a central secure location. Just as I walked out of his office, my boss walked in (at around 8:30). Talking to him, I discovered that he had given all of the CD's to another manager, who doesn't show up until 9 (he actually walked in about 9:15). In an attempt to cover all my bases, I talked to yet a third manager (four if you count the CIO) to see if he might have ended up with the software. Perhaps you can see where this is going...

When the second manager finally arrived, I checked his stash and struck out. At this point I'd pretty much looked everywhere I could think of and I had started working on trying to figure out why the version on my desktop computer wouldn't talk to framemaker. At that point, having looked everywhere I decided I might as well completely exhaust that avenue and completely search my cube. Starting from the entrance and working in I went through everything with a fine-toothed comb. I opened and emptied all software boxs, checked every CD case to confirm there was only one CD in it, opened every CD-rom (I have more than you might think) and went page by page through every stack of papers I had. It was while doing this, that sandwiched between a stack of Open Source documentation (right between the mod_ssl manual and the tomcat 3.1 faq), I finally found the CD. Had I done this yesterday I might have avoided looking like an idiot in front of three managers and the CIO.

So, obviously things could have been a lot worse, though I'm still not out of the woods. This particular piece of software is notoriously tempermental and I still have to get it working again on some machine, though having an install disk and a licence key will go a long way towards helping with that. Also, this wasn't an easy project that turned difficult; this was a difficult project which almost turned impossible. As it is, I'll still, barring a miracle, be in here tomorrow assuming I can get through the perimeter Salt Lake City is throwing up around the city for tomorrow's marathon.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula postero
Ross