D'oh Moments

Thanks for all the lovely comment in recent days. I love Linda's gracious wishes. She's working towards 400 and she's still happy for little old me. Shucks. You gals are amazing. I promise not to call you gals again - especially Missouri Michael.

Let's move on.

Here's a couple of stories to make you feel better about yourself - because you're not me. I had to book a supply teacher for this past Thursday so that I could plan for a day next week when I teach teachers how to use the SmartBoard in Math. The irony is that I'd never used one before and the teacher who was teaching me how to use it had forgotten half the things he used to know about it. Anyway, here's the funny part of the story: When I was booking the supply teacher online, I kept getting booted out of the system. "Please try again in a few moments." So I kept retrying.

The next day, the vice principal of my school urgently approaches me. I'm thinking that they saw me standing on a table hanging a poster and that I'd been fired. It turns out that when I kept retrying to book a supply, I kept booking more supply teachers. In the end, I'd booked four supply teachers and the VP was dealing with a crew of angry teachers who thought they had a gig, only to be told, "No, sorry, our inept grade 2/3 teacher just has sausage fingers."

I ran into one of these disgruntled teachers today and he had a good laugh when I told him the story. This story reminded me of my worst screw up at work ever. It happened about ten years ago when I was working at an independent book store in Toronto. For some mind boggling reason, the eccentric store owner insisted we sticker all of the books with barcode stickers, even though the books already had barcodes on them and surely they could have programmed their prices into the codes.

At the time of my hiring, the store manager gave me one of those annoying little speeches about not wasting store products, especially the stickers, which apparently cost a lot of money. We always had a little pile of books that hadn't been stickered. One Sunday afternoon, I decided to get these books on the shelf. The first book was King Lear. I'm not making this up. I entered all the information into the computer and hit "print." You could always hear the stickers printing off in the back office. I went to the front to help a customer. When I returned to the back of the store, I heard the printer still going. "Hmm. That's odd. I'm only printing about ten stickers." It turned out that I entered the ISBN numbers into the quantity of stickers box. This means that approximately 700 million King Lear stickers would print.

Like Ferris Bueller trying to take miles off the car by leaving it up on block in reverse, I somewhat dimly thought that I could switch the printer off and it would just stop. It didn't.

Eventually, I called the techie guy on staff and made my big confession. He said, "We'll just have to reboot the computer." When he did this, we lost power on all the computers (including the ones needed to ring up books at the cash register). It just went from bad to worse. We frantically made a call to the archaic computer company who were able to make an emergency call on a Sunday. In the meanwhile, we had to write down the ISBNs for everything sold and ring things up with a calculator and pad of paper. Eesh! I get knots in my stomach just thinking about it. I'm sure if the owner had cottoned onto my big blunder, I would have been making Timbits the following week. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

There you have it. I'm sure this lovely German weather expert would feel my pain.

Erin