The Aerie
Update: And why is no check in my mailbox? The consulting firm's contact told me to invoice my time using a website... but the financial people at the consulting firm don't use the website. Too much bother figuring it out and getting access rights, apparently. No, I have to print off the web page and fax it to them. So I'm not getting any money for, oh, at least a week if not longer...
Sigh. Okay, so everybody is healthy. Nothing has been damaged. There have been no accidents or emergencies. There is no smoke or blood.
Have we set the scope appropriately? So that having been said, yesterday was Disaster Day.
I went to the Post Office in search of a check, and was excited to spot an envelope through the little glass window on the little brass door. Imagine, then, my disappointment when instead of a check I found an IRS letter.
The IRS letter said "We still have not received your tax return for March of 2006, you owe $X,000." Well, it said something like that. Actually my eyes got so spooked that they leaped into the ditch like hobbits on the nazgul freeway as soon as I saw the IRS logo, and I really couldn't take in the content.
I drove to work (not on West River Road) and faxed the form to my tax accountant with a cover letter that included the acronym "WTF". Midway through the day I got an e-mail back. The IRS must have lost the tax FORM, my accountant told me, which is easily replaced. So for March of 2006, you just have to re-submit the tax FORM. Not the $X,000.
So that was a relief. I read on.
However, she continued, you owe $X,000 for your 2006 personal taxes.
My response in e-mail was simply "I can practically hear my skullbones cracking." I don't know if that made any sense to her, but that's all I could think of given that I had an absolutely fearsome headache even BEFORE I got her e-mail.
Part of the reason I had the fearsome headache was work. Brought onboard three weeks ago, I was tasked with the impossible: manage a project to install a firewall into a production network, in one month. This was ridiculous: normally such a thing would require, for example, recompiling all the applications on the servers to be protected by the firewall, which simply could not be accomplished in a month even if there were a list of all the applications on those servers to begin with, which there was not.
However, one of the employees here is a fellow I worked with at another client a couple years back, and he is brilliant. He came up with a way to add the firewall without needing a recompilation, and was able to test and configure the firewall in the lab. So I was entertaining the possibility of pulling off a miracle on my very first project.
Yesterday I learned that the evaluator, who will determine whether or not this new firewall is sufficient, just returned from a security seminar. All fired up with security evangelism, yesterday he called for two new items to be added to the firewalled network - intrusion detection, and two-factor authentication. Without explaining what those are, I can tell you that both require an existing infrastructure to support them, and there is almost no way these can be added in the next week-and-a-half to three weeks that remain.
So there goes that miracle.
Then I spoke with the company organizing the classes that I'll be teaching in London the week-after-next. In the course of discussions I was informed that, contrary to what I had been told before, I will NOT be teaching from 4:00-9:00 pm every night, I'll be teaching from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day. So suddenly I have twice as many class-hours to teach, and my days of idle London tourism turn into a week of sitting around a motel every evening preparing for the next day's class.
By far the smallest of the disasters, but still annoying. I'm even more glad that I arranged to spend the surrounding weekends in England, and I guess I am happy, now, that my spouse decided not to go. She'd have spent the whole week alone except for the evenings, and doubtless been seduced during the day by some handsome British soldier and run off with him to Majorca. So I guess that's a disaster averted.
And still I have not received my first paycheck.
The idea of crawling under a rock is sounding more and more attractive.
Posted by Albatross at March 16, 2007 10:34 AM | TrackBack