People like to talk, so when I mentioned that my Mom died over the holiday break they would launch into stories about the deaths of their own family members. "How old was she?" they would ask. This helps people to gauge how shocked and horrified to be. "She was 86" I would say. This seemed to be considered an acceptable age to meet one's destiny. Somehow I found it so comforting to hear people describe the details of what was notable about their own experiences, realizing that it's all a part of life.
Then the technical issues. My PC was having trouble connecting to the network in the office and it took until 11:00 to run through the script with the support tech and finally convince someone to fix the problem with the dns server. 3 hours to prove it wasn't my machine. It was nice though; it gave me an excuse to go and shoot the breeze with people because there was no hope of working.
Finally the best error message of my entire career. This afternoon Outlook was still having some issues. I had a meeting at 2:30. It had a meeting reminder that popped up at 2:15. Outlook lets you set a "snooze" delay until it reminds you again -- the default is 5 minutes before the meeting starts. So I clicked on the "snooze" button and Outlook could not do it. I have never seen this error message before but here is what Outlook said:
Snooze Operation Terminated
It perfectly expresses what working does to your afternoon siestas. I am so bummed that I didn't think to get a screen capture of it.
