sitting, waiting, wishing

I'm at work right now, waiting on an electrician to come provide me with a dedicated circuit and pull CAT5 wire for my new project.

We're upgrading our payment processing at long last. We've been processing credit cards over dial-up and the wait was becoming more than unbearable, but in order to upgrade our credit card processing, we had to upgrade our entire terminals to allow DSL.

I like to say we're upgrading our current POS (piece of shit) for a new POS (point of service).

Things didn't go as planned along the way, and no matter how much time you allow in the planning stages for bumps, somehow it's never enough. That's not me being negative, I'm just being honest. I've been regularly emailing Heidi, my new best friend at AT&T, and she's been talking me through all the hoops I've had to jump through to get DSL service at one of my two locations. It's odd when you can hear exasperation in an email, and Heidi was sending some emails heavy with it.

For the most part, we've got it all straightened out, and I'm up and running on pretty much the coolest POS ever at the first location. It even has an integrated server, so that we don't have to waste non-existant space in the back for a server.

My second location has run into a couple of snags, the most important being an extensive delay due to first, an error of some sort that needed to be cleared on their end (when I first was talking to Heidi about this problem, I couldn't distinguish her saying "error" from "air" -- I thought she was saying AT&T needed to "clear the air," which made absolutely no sense) and second, a lack of physical resources in the area where the install was to take place. Looks like that's been cleared -- the error or air, whichever -- and we're all set to go. "Go live," that is, which is the horrifically techie term for Wednesday when my second site will be up and running.

Our programming manager for this install turned out to be a pretty cool guy and I've inquired about positions with his company. Not that I'm seriously considering leaving, but I think I missed my calling by not going into the tech field. In college, I never even considered it as a program of study, it was akin to studying, say, math. Well, maybe not that bad, but it certainly didn't have the appeal of international relations, my emphasis in political science.

So I'm still waiting for this electrician to come by. He was supposed to come by last week, but something came up. He was supposed to be by Monday morning, but something came up. Same thing for Monday afternoon, Wednesday morning and Wednesday afternoon. I'm pretty much tired of waiting for this guy, needless to say, but the end result will be worth all this waiting.

I think.

(As you may have guessed, this was written on the BB so 'scuse any misspellings.)