For me, this week began on Friday and ends today…  And it was the BEST week ever, at least in terms of work.  We were left with the largest production to date from out facility…  And we got it done!!!!!  There was nothing that we could not handle and management was very happy Monday morning…  Although we got everything done, the week was not without its difficulties.

Saturday – I came in PUMPED!!!  I had an epiphany Friday night and had a game-plan for how I was going to tackle things on Saturday, and the day was going great.  I came in at 6:00 and got to work in the SQL back-end of our systems.  I wrapped up all that I need to wrap up and began another process.  At that point, I assigned the remaining people in the building to QA of what we had done so far.  Man, things were going good.  It was a good day, until. . .  DISASTER!!!!!  I was working on the last part of the SQL bits when I wrote a query to do a very general and easy thing.  See, up until now, we had been assigning documents a value of 1, 2, or 3 (depending on differing and related criteria), and we would produce based on that number.  In case you are wondering, we are an e-discovery shop and we produce documents for litigation support.  Anywho, we were finalizing part of the process when I ran that simple query. . .  In which, I was supposed to set the documents that had not yet been assigned a value to the value of 3.  Well, to put it simply, I did just the opposite!!!  I assigned all the document that HAD a value to the value of 3.  Essentially, everything we had worked on and assigned had been wiped out.  I erased ALL of our progress…  and the production was due Sunday at 12:00 to be delivered to another city.  I FREAKED OUT!!!  I told the guy that was working with me what I had done, and he was like, “Oh.  This is bad.  This is not good.”  We began quickly repairing the damage I had done.   Well, about 3 hours later, we fixed it and were able to continue.  We were back on track at that point, and I went home.

I was supposed to go out with some friends from work that night to a play, but with my day like it was and getting off late, I just went home and relaxed.

Sunday – I was ready to go, and thought that my day would be a cake-walk.  I would walk in, Anil would come in, we would do our thing and produce at like 10:00.  Well…  That did not happen.  I get there and begin getting the production ready.  Anil comes in at like 8:30.  He gets cracking, and I wait.  At that point, we are going through some images of the documents that were created last night to make sure they were ok.  Sometimes, we have to produce images to people to review them.  For this production, we had to do that.  In the process Saturday, we had a few documents that did not image correctly.  I had the guys on 2nd shift fix them.  When we came in Sunday, it was done, but we discovered that the images were made in COLOR and not BLACK & WHITE.  We had to re-print them…  THAT WAS NOT FUN, but we got them done.  The last step in the process was to re-insert the images that were produced last night into the system in place of the ones that had errors.  Simple, right?  NO!!!  That wound up taking about 7 hours.  I was NOT happy.  But what really upset me, and while it is really not that big a deal, was that the guy that was fixing them decided to spend HOURS trying to fix one file.  If it had been me, I would have done everything up to that file, THEN worked on it the best I could while time allowed.  In short, the production was 9 hours late.  I could not even finish my piece of the project, I had to hand it off to Stephen.  I WAS STRESSED!!!  I really wanted to get it done.  In the end, though, all went well and it was produced.  We were able to get it to our client by their deadline and the world rejoiced.  Ok, may not that…  but it still got done!  Our managers were very happy with the team over the weekend, and I told them all on Sunday afternoon that we should all very pleased with ourselves as we got the production out of the house without any management in the building!  It was such an accomplishment.

Of course, production will become routine, and this will never be as exciting again, but the first time begin-to-end in a process is something to be celebrated. 

And with that, I gotta go…

-=brett=-