Not a good day

Yesterday was a miserable day. It was the closest I've been in a long time to shouting every swear word I know all at once in one incoherent sentence. For those of you that know me, you know that's a big deal.

I came into work yesterday morning knowing it was going to be busy. The 1st and 3rd of every month are always busy days in the bank. The blue-hairs that read this rag know why. For those of us who'll never see them, it's when the Social Security checks come in the mail. Besides waiting on every person who stepped foot in my office, I also had to finish two big reports, figure out the third quarter payroll taxes for Lifeline, close and record two small business loans I've been working on for a month, and return my October numbers so my tellers could get paid their incentive.

I'm a big boy, so I thought I could handle it. That was until I tried to send an email to an underwriter and found out that my entire Outlook email address book was empty. 300 names, gone! After talking to our support center I was told some security parameters in a recent network download had deleted them all. They told me it had also happened to about 100 other employees. The kicker was there was no way to recover them. I had to re-enter every email address I'd ever used. Seems easy enough, no wait, the backup Contact Manager with all that information was fried too. That's right, I had nothing. NOTHING!!! Whatever I happened to keep up in the old memory banks was all I had to fall back on. And guess what? That ain't a lot!

So I spent yesterday, in between all that stuff I had to do, trying to write down everything I could remember. I came up with about 30 names yesterday and another 20 today. So basically I have access to about 17% of all the email addresses I had ever used. I've always said that this technology was going to bite us hard someday. Guess that so-called technology heard me and got pissed off enough it decided to teach me a lesson. I learned, all right? Now give me back all my information!