Where's Epi?

It's been a fortnight since I last posted a single word, or since I last visited my friends' blogs.

In total embarrassment, I apologise for disappearing off the face of the earth as it were, but it really has been - and still is - pretty hectic.


If I were to sum up the goings on in my life in these days, it would be as follows:

WORK

Yes, that's where I've been! Working like it's going out of fashion!

Clocking an average of twelve hours a day, including - albeit reluctantly - participating in the relief for the victims of the recent wildfires.

That's pretty much it!

I've been spending most of my limited free time catching up on some Z's and trying to keep my house in a livable state.

Highlights of the past two weeks have been taking my car in for a service (and changing break ads) and voting on the general election! That's pretty pathetic for life content in any one's book. Right?

Unfortunately, I'm still not in a position to guarantee frequent posts, but I promise to put in a more concerted effort.

I miss you guys!

Talk to you soon!!!

Tired

A doodle prepared between several phone calls

Driving to work each morning I pass through a junction with a little memorial in the shape of a Greek Orthodox church on one of the corners. It was placed there by the family and friends of a poor 25year old who was killed -run over by a truck - on that particular spot.

It always makes me think of the cliche "Live each day of your life as if it were your last one".

Have I done that today? Have I in fact done so in the past weeks and months? The answer is "No"!

I even wonder sometimes whether I actually have a life!

Going through the daily routine of getting up at 5.00am and being at the office until 8.00pm or 9.00pm hardly constitutes having a life. (Keep in mind that it's a job that I do not like, for a company I like even less)!

Returning home exhausted with enough energy to only prepare a bowl of corn flakes for dinner, trying to steal some minutes to write a post so that I don't alienate myself from new friends - I have not seen your childhood friends for almost a year now! - perhaps make a phone call to my girlfriend half way across the globe, getting a shower and five hours sleep before I hit this vicious circle again, hardly constitutes having a life!

I ask the Big Guy upstairs to cut me some slack, knowing deep inside that I should be grateful for my health, my family, my friends.

Yet, I still know that there is more to life than this!

There must be a better job out there for me! There must be some way of making a family with my girl! There must be some way of filling up my life!

All I am asking for, BIG GUY, is Cut Me Some Slack Already!!!

Here goes another one

...flying over the cookoo's nest!

This seems to be the best description of office life these past couple of weeks.

Thankfully, I'm not the only one in there desperately trying to keep up with what seems to be a long lost plot!

It has now become painfully obvious that our ERP and WPS systems are not best of friends, they hardly ever communicate with each other, except for human intervention. We have therefore changed our job titles to "Human Interfaces", constantly transferring data from one to the other.

Meanwhile, we try to put some discipline into the two spoilt kindergarten brats, only to be thrown back by some new surprising behaviour by each of them. The use of pen and paper has become mandatory, to such an extent that we seem to go through a dozen of trees' worth of paper a day!

Deep inside, all of us are aware that we are completely and utterly screwed for the next few months! It'll take a lot of time for the two brats to reconcile their differences and become the friends we all hope and pray they become. Time that we don't have since the Earth revolves around itself every twenty for hours!

To make things more interesting, the majority of the people are taking their annual leave around this time, leaving behind a couple of heroic fighters trying desperately to joggle a few hundred of daily tasks between them.

What is surprising though, is that this state of affairs has brought up the best of the previously untapped humour hidden in each and every one of us!

No action occurs without somebody making a funny remark about it! Especially when there some kind of a cock up involved. And believe you me, there's a heck of a lot of cock ups these days!

The hours we spend at the office, carrying out our "interface" duties are building up to such an extent, that today we even ordered out for a pizza for dinner. Other co-workers go out for drinks or food. We bring it to the office!

With September being the busiest moth in the year for our company, and the proverbial light-in-the-tunnel of our current software mess being months away, we have all resigned to the idea that the trend of pizza dinners at the office is going to become a status quo.

Anyone care for a slice?

Gangbanged!

My dear fellow bloggers, this is not an X-rated themed post, although the odd profanity may make its way to the text. Instead, it's a pretty accurate description of how my co-workers and I feel after this weekend at work.

A more accurate description would by "gangbanged by a Viagra overdosed horde of elephants, freshly released from a ten year sexual drought". Yes! That's more like it.

I find stock taking a tedious, boring, but nevertheless important part of working life. It comes once or twice a year, and everyone is mentally prepared for getting bored senseless of trying to find stuff and accounting for any kinds of variances. So how do you make it more interesting to the staff?

Well, our gracious employers, always considering the best way of maintaining the spirits of the staff high during such periods, this year came up with an alternative plan! At the end of it, they planned the live introduction of an additional software package, designed to make our lives easier, and reducing the manual input of data to our ERP system.

It has been a project going on for the past four, perhaps five months. There have been meetings upon meetings, discussions upon discussions covering the length of the project, including a whole one hour (!) training session for the people who are going to be using it. It was during that training session, that we all realised we were dead meat! We raised questions about the procedures, the input method and so on and so forth. The software company representative who was giving us the training had an answer for each of our questions.

Yet answers of the type: "They didn't mention you need this!", "We were not requested to cover that kind of situation", "Is that what actually happens?", are hardly reassuring that all is well in the western front!

Come last Sunday every tiniest fear we had that we were totally screwed, was finally realised!

We finished our stock taking by 09.30am and then it was a matter of going live on the new system.

To be fair, the first couple of tests gave excellent results. We were cooking with gas!

Were we f..k!!! When it came to linking to our ERP, you could actually smell the foul scent of shit, while listening to the deafening sound of it hitting the proverbial fan! 11.45am the whole process ground to a halt, while the IT guys were trying to sort out the issue.

It was a slow and painful experience that went on and on. Five coffees later, hours and hours of SQL-what the hell it is I don't even want to know-we were getting a dim bright spot at the end of a quite long tunnel! In the meantime, several of the staff were excused to leave and join their families, for whatever was left to them of the Sunday afternoon. I went around the premises seeking for the dog - she has not been seen since Saturday and I fear she has met with some kind of ill fortune from the mongrels in the vicinity of our offices - then watched a helicopter do water drops on a rubbish pit fire 300 yards away, and then sat on my desk and doodled some tropical island scene.

The sun descended into the horizon, but we were still there, by now struggling with the communication between the software packages. To cut a long story short, some kind of a breakthrough came by 11.45pm, and we all decided to call it a day.

Monday was going to be better, we reassured each other, while getting into our cars. Was it f..k?

Come Monday morning we realised that although the two systems were communicating, they were exchanging information of no use to each other! Wait! Wait! It gets better!!!!

Lots of IT fiddling going on, the whole premises ground to a halt, and the phones starts to ring. Our inter company customers were calling to find out whether our logistics department was going to meet their needs! Ha! Fat chance! Not in your lifetime dude! Not with this kind of project preparation!

It turns out that our new super duper package can do virtually anything you ask it to do. It's a real pity, though, that during all these months of running the project, nobody considered looking at our procedures, nobody thought it would be worth their while to if not ask, at least sit in a corner and take notes of how the department works.

As a result, we are now three days into the system going live, we have managed to cover about 20% of our work, and the paperwork raised requires a small army of personnel for data entry alone! It is like someone came to your house, decided to use your stove to bake you a cake, and demolished your kitchen while doing it!

This is a big mess that will take some time to set straight, especially with virtually half of the people due to go on leave in August! Perhaps the Chinese proverb says "may you live in interesting times" but this is pretty much ludicrous. Bloody Greeks, taking things to extremes again!

Helicopter putting out fire across our offices

My island retreat doodle

Back to work

"Tell me why I don't like Mondays. I wanna shoot the hole day down!" the Boomtown Rats, of Bob Geldof fame, used to sing and was it appropriate for me today!!!

Having spent two weeks off work, this morning was a wake up call. Reality doesn't change, it's just our perspective on things!

Reality slapped me in the face this morning in the rudest way possible. It was not the early (5.30am) wake up, it was not the traffic driving to work, none of these usually frustrating things. It was the realisation that it's now almost four years that I have been doing a job I don't enjoy a single bit, for employers that I've grown to dislike for their ineptitude, disorganisation and bigotry! (I am not trying to be an arrogant sod, nor am I claiming to be God's gift to management here).

"Congratulations Epi, you've invented the wheel!" I hear you cry out in unison. "As if it is the only company in the world that works that way".

I am fully aware that it is not- philosophers know such things you know. It is just that I got weak at the knees because all my efforts to leave there and improve my working life, have to-date proved futile.

Patience and perseverance I know- You see! You jumped the gun again -is the name of the game, and believe me I'm making valiant efforts to improve on that. Sometimes, however, I get scared with time and life passing me by! Could I be going about things wrong? Possibly! Am I spending too much time worrying about things? Certainly! Should I be concentrating on my personal life more than my career? Most definitely. (After all, I sacrificed a good career in search of personal happiness). Could I get through to you-know-who in Brazil over the weekend? No! QED!!!

Anyway. I don't want to pass the negative feelings of my return to work, on to you.

I would like instead to share with you some of the photocopies I got scanned the other day that perfectly describe what I've been ranting about. (I don't know if it is possible, but feel free to make copies of them, as I'm sure they apply elswhere, too).

Have a good week!

Words

As I was leaving home to go to school, my mom would always tell me: "Have a good day, and remember to be careful of traffic, women and drugs".
Wise words, that have followed me through my life! So long, I've only had a single encounter with drugs, and never had an accident in the streets (though I've come close to, twice). It is just the part of women that I haven't mastered yet, and never believe I will! What can I say. It is not as if I'm the only man on the planet who has not mastered the art of reading a woman's mind.
But I digress! The issue for writing this post is to share with you the words of a not so famous Greek expat in West Africa. Words that I return to on difficult times.

The gentleman has called a subordinate to his office to give him a piece of his mind for something that was done contrary to his instructions.

The subordinate is trying all sort of excuses to cover up for his mistake in a vain attempt to pull the proverbial wool over the manager's eyes.
Frustrated for not being able to find the cause of the breakdown in communication, at the end of his tether with listening to stupid excuses the manager lashes out:

"You think I know fuck nothing? I know fuck all!"

True words of wisdom! Words that are etched to my mind forever....

Why did I go to work today?

This morning I woke up with great difficulty. My usual 10 minute snooze (I am the snoozing kinda person. The type who sets up the alarm 10 minutes earlier so that I can enjoy my morning lay-in) took about 30 minutes. I ended up getting into traffic and my usual thirty minute drive to work, lasted the best part of 2 hours.

Although everytihng went like clockwork throughout the day, five minutes before I was about to leave, my boss asked for a quick chit-chat.

I hate these chit-chats because not only do they take hours and hours, the outcome is pretty much bugger-all.

This session was no exception! We ended up talking for an hour, and the result was that I'll have to produce a forest worth (and this on the international day for the environment) of absolutely useless forms. Forms that serve virtually no purpose but filling up folders. The more paperwork we create, the more bussy we look, the more work seems to be done. Bureaucracy at its best!

Therefore, the least I can do for my company is to dedicate to them some cartoons about work.

And my absolute favourite: