12 hour work days (and then add that friggin’ two hours commute time) are not conducive to blog reading and writing.  I’m so behind!  Add some PMS on top of it, and Voila!  Basketcase.

Nah, not really, I’m good now.  Lots of prep time and attention to detail and the final conversion happened today.  I budgeted both days of the weekend for it, and we got done in one.  Yay us!   “Us” is my assistant and a good consultant friend who does lots of projects with me.  My assistant has been more helpful than usual this week, I’m rather impressed with him

I do the IT for an office of 33 people.  We converted the e-mail system from the old standby bullet-proof GroupWise that we’ve been using for years, to the dreaded MicroSloth LookOut.  I outsourced the Exchange server.  I think that’s the wave of the future, anyway, and makes disaster planning easier.  If I would have done this two years later we’d have gone straight to corporate Gmail. But for the time being, this will be easier to integrate (maybe) with some of my current and near future projects.

What made this hard was a) I made people change their old, worn out and weak passwords for burly strong ones.  It was rather like pulling teeth.  But it’s done, across the board, and it’s all good.  The other hard part is b) that we’ve been using GW for years, and most of the staff has been there for years (low turnover= pretty good place to work, usually) and CHANGE IS HARD.  It’s just Outlook ferwgawdsake, but I’m sure Monday will be fraught with trauma.  Everyone is rather entrenched in their routines.

The worst (at least most avoidably annoying) part of this was:  My boss went to Florida for the week – right before he left he asked if I could put the e-mail changeover off a week because if for some reason his Blackberry wouldn’t work while he was gone he’d be VERY ANGRY.  This is after innumerable e-mails to people over the last six weeks, exhorting them to clean up, giving them the deadline, working with the other companies, getting the MX records shifted, getting the Blackberries all set to move over, blah blah blah.  I said, “No, was I supposed to work around his schedule?” He said, “Well, I AM the CEO.”  Barf.  He actually said that.

He would not take a laptop as backup just in case “shit happened” because that would be so much harder than shifting around all the rest of the staff and the companies and the project etc. etc. etc.  Selfish pr*ck.  I gave him the relatively simple instructions for re-registering his device and told him he’d be fine.

He called me at 7 this (Saturday) morning and said it didn’t work.  I figured out where he was in the process, told him what to do, and he started to do it and (accidentally, I hope) hung up on me.  Called me back a few minutes later and I detailed what the screen should look like if it was working and (of course) it was.  He said, “Send me a test e-mail” and hung up.  So I did.  And I got in the car and drove (the frigging hour) into work.  Halfway there, I got this email:

“Works_what is the address for getting mail on a computer on the road??”  Yeah, you’re welcome, asshole. But he must have taken his laptop, which is good, because he wanted the OWA URL.  Naturally, I’d sent two emails already with the specific OWA info, but he probably didn’t read them.  Par.    Blah Blah Blah bitch moan whine.  All’s well that ends well , I guess.

I’ve just come home, pounded down a Guinness and sent the kid out for more.  If he hurries, you can watch my literacy decline.