work, work and more work

So Friday was a bonkers work day.

As I mentioned last week it was my initial intention to come in on Saturday morning and finish off the upload for a bid we were doing.  Well, that post was written on Thursday and instead of that I thought I'd try and do it all on Friday.

Initially this meant coming in very early - I started at about 7AM.  The morning went okay, with me managing to upload most everything that we had already done, and taking me about 2.5 hours.

However, even if I'd wanted to (and had the time) some of wasn't finished, so wouldn't be available to upload until later.

In the meantime I worked on another bid.  That went okay, although it was more work than I'd initially anticipated.  It also didn't help that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, I sent that off at about 6PM and so then came my second attempt at the other bid.  In case I didn't explain it had to be uploaded via an online portal, which are never the simplest or easiest of things, but the added problem here was it was clear almost everybody had decided to uploaded on the Friday.

That meant that as the day wore on the system basically ground to a halt.  A single click of a "yes" button was taking several minutes to even register and start to update and uploading stuff was basically impossible.

I'd hoped that if I left it until early evening then a lot of people would be finished, but that didn't really seem to help matters as it was still crushingly slow at 6PM.

I therefore decided I would go and do other stuff (I bought some petrol, went shopping, had some dinner, went home, put the shopping away, changed clothes and sorted out a few domestic bits in preparation for the weekend) and then come back.  This meant I returned to work at about 9PM.

At this time it was actually working well - back to how it had been very early in the morning.  However, there was still a lot to upload, so it took me a further hour and a half or so to upload it all.  I actually read some manga while I was doing it, so it wasn't too bad.

However, it did mean all told that I didn't get home until well after 11PM - that's quite a work day by anyone's standards!

On top of that, part of the reason I moved my plan to Friday was because we were supposed to be switching to a new server over the Bank Holiday weekend... and it didn't work.  So I could have basically done it Saturday or even popped in on Monday!

Anyway, I'm going to try to take it a bit easier this week to compensate a bit for the huge week last week.