I Did It

I finally did it. I got my hair bobbed. It is now just a shade longer than chin-length. I feel like a new woman. And I look like one, too. I can’t stop shaking my head and running my fingers through my hair.

Damn, now I’m going to have to break out the round brush and blow dryer on a regular basis.

So, today at work I got yelled at by the IT guy. See, we’ve been having these problems with the new fax program scrunching numbers or just plain eliminating columns of numbers from reports. So, someone’s report will say $1,115.79 when it should really say $15,115.79. This is ungood. Our clients very irately reported this issue to us, and we reported it to Andrew, and Andrew reported it to the IT department. And the IT guy mainly in charge of the fax software had a little bit to say to us about it.

He storms in while Loni’s on the phone, and starts ranting at me, since I’m closest to him. "I cannot be held responsible for every fax," he announces, and shows me what we already knew: that there was a column of digits missing. Yes, yes, we know. But then he claims that it’s the client’s fax machine at fault. It must glitch while feeding paper at that point. I politely explain that when we fax these same clients manually, it goes through fine. This steams him even more.

At this point Loni is off the phone, and tries to jump in. Her normal, interruptive conversational style isn’t working for her in this instance. (It rarely does.) She chimes in and says what I just said, that manually faxing works fine. Larry says that we can manually fax every client, then, and he’ll just get rid of the software entirely. Loni shoots back that we’ll have clients pulling out for lack of service, then, and that will be bad for Sky. She also mentions that BitWare (our old, Windows 95 compatible fax software) worked just fine. Larry yells back — over his shoulder, since he’s already started to storm out — that we can find fax software on our own and tell him all about it, or he can just put us back on BitWare, then, and be done with it.

Of course, the red-faced yelling and pissed-off attitude doesn’t really come through in my little transcription here, but I think you get the point. As much as I hate to admit it, I share my mother’s dislike of confrontation, and I try to defuse every volatile situation I find myself in. From my perspective, we were just pointing out a bug in the software, and asking them to look into it. From his perspective, though, I’m sure we were personally attacking this project he’d spent months working through and perfecting. I can understand where he’s coming from, though I don’t think I’d react nearly the same way.

After he stalked out, we told Andrew how Larry had treated us and spoken to us, and I communicated to him that I found it unprofessional, ill-mannered, and uncalled-for. Andrew talked to his boss, Ruth, and I’m sure she talked to HR. So, we’ll see what happens.

Oh, Loni told me later on that this Larry guy has a reputation for having a bad temper. He got a talking-to from HR once for throwing a printer across a room. Yikes.