Bad Day Already...

...and it's only 6:30 a.m. One of my functions (well, my group's function) is to be a liaison between a group of people who are off-site and our people here. My group alternates carrying an on-call pager so we can continue with this function (and for other stuff) 24/7. My week ended yesterday, but I had my backup take it from me for one night, so I kept it for him until today. Of course that means I'll get paged...what was I thinking? So it goes off at 5:30 this morning. I call them, they give me an acronym and tell me to call the person in charge of that, who they admit is probably really obscure. I can't find it in my phone book, so I come in to work and look it up in the acronym spreadsheet. Nothing. I call them back, they give me two names. So I spend some time calling people (probably waking them up), calling back the people who paged me, and finally just getting someone to volunteer to come in and see what the heck they're talking about. Oh, and in the course of the calling, I find out that I misunderstood the acronyms...who knew A and E sounded so much alike when you just get out of bed in the morning? I'm sure everyone now thinks I'm an idiot. This is the second time I've gotten paged where something like this happened (not the misunderstanding part, but just something that makes them think I'm an idiot). Grrr... So now I don't really need to be here, but I figured I'd stay another half hour or so in case they need something else. And I'm sure they're going to talk to my boss on Monday and tell them how stupid I am and he should fire me, blah, blah, blah. What a good way to start the three-day weekend. Jeff, next time I volunteer to keep the pager an extra day for you, remind me of this story and do anything you have to to take it away. Oh, wait. There won't be a next time.

Ok, the person I thought was coming in just called and tried to get out of it. The people who paged me gave me two names, his and another guy who is on vacation. They specifically said those two people, not the second guy's backup, not anyone else. So I tried to tell him that, he sounded really irritated and then said fine, he'd come in. I'm sorry, I'm doing my best!!! Grrrr!