Idiots

Why is the world so full of idiots?

Let me rephrase that. Why is the world so full or inconsiderates?

Yesterday on the way home I had to stop at the store to get some milk. Well being that it was 5pm and the mad rush to get home, the parking lot was full. This particular store has a very small parking lot. To help they setup a row of parking spots a little smaller than normal and thus appropriatly marked them as 'compact only'. My car, a VW Jetta, fits fine in these spots. But the Ford Explorer and the FULL-sized Chevy van that I had to park between clearly did not! The Explorer wasn't as bad as the van but it's still not a compact vehicle! The vans wheels were literally ON both yellow dividing lines. I had about a foot and a half from my car to that van when I got out. Luckly I'm a slim guy.

I got out quickly, so I didn't have to worry about door dings or anything, but that kinda crap pisses me off. There were other full-sized parking spots just a bit further out. But no they had to be lazy. Grrr!

Then as I was backing out, having watched for other traffic, an SUV came down the lane and nearly hit me because the driver was totally in their own world. Uhh, it's a parking lot. People are pulling out all over the place. Don't you think you should be PAYING ATTENTION!??

Finally, I got a call at about 10:15 or so last night from my boss. The office isn't responding. The phone system isn't working and he cannot connect to some of the servers. I use my VPN connection to check on things. I was able to get to my PC, but not the servers. I thought that was odd. Normally the servers will stay up, due to battery backup, much longer than my own PC. Dave asked me to drive in and check it out. When I got there the building was lit up and everything seemed fine. How odd. I get to our offices and things are working, but I hear the beeping of the battery backups. It was only a handful of outlets. We had blown a circuit. Ugh! My servers were on that circuit, so they stayed up as long as they had backup power, but that's typically only 30-45 minutes.

While talking to Dave about this, I find out that we had a carpet cleaner in last night cleaning the carpets. The jerk blew the breaker and left it! We have no idea at this point how long it was off. As far as we know he never called anyone to get the breaker reset. I had to do it when I got there. Luckly we have a key to the maintainace room on our floor. The power in our building is antiquated and overloaded. Actually the whole neighborhood is overloaded. It's a good thing we are not a 24/7 business that would have lost revenue on this. As it was, Dave and I spent about 3 hours on it, plus my cost of fuel and the potential costs of our customers or prospective ones who were trying to access the FTP server for application updates or marketing materials.

All the moron would have had to do is call the building manager, who could have called the maintainance man and us and things could have been up and running again in no time. As it is I suspect we were offline for a minimum of 2 hours. May not seems significant to some, especially since we have little hard costs, but it's more the principle of the deal. The guy should have called something. No instead he walked away from it like a child who broke something. Take responsibility for your actions! Even if you ARE and idiot.