Musical Offices

Across the street from my office building BP is building a child care facility. A small crew of men was out yesterday with their backhoe and ditch witch laying the phone and data cables for the building. Someone got a little overzealous with the backhoe and cut through the underground conduit and completely severed the fiber cables we, ConocoPhillips and BP, use for our internet and phones. Thankfully it happened late in the afternoon. My co-worker and I made a quick tour of our floors to let folks know what was going on and then left for the day. Nothing much you can do when most of the software applications we use only work if there is network (intranet and internet) connectivity.

As I drove in this morning, the "small" crew from yesterday had swelled to a small army of men and trucks with more backhoe's, ditch witch's and cable pullers blocking most of the road. I would hate to be the guy operating the backhoe yesterday. You don't cut off internet and phone service to the #4 (BP) and #10 (COP) companies on the Fortune 500 list and not have any backlash. Poor guy! Hopefully he already got his yearly bonus, cuz I doubt there's going to be one next year.

Anyway, network was still out this morning so after helping a few people out here at my office, my boss told me to go over to the main complex across the highway and work from there until all was fixed. No sooner had I fired up my laptop than I got an email saying network connectivity had been restored.

Murphy's Law!! Had I stayed here and waited it out, the network would still be down!

It wasn't a completely wasted trip. I spoke with a few co-workers and got some interesting information.

One of my co-workers also does credit counseling and he's been helping me for a while get my credit rating up. I want to be able to buy a house in the next 12-18 months while housing prices are down. So we were able to get some business done in that area. Not related to work, but still useful!

I also found out good news regarding my job. A few months ago management was telling us we were going to have to downsize our department by two positions. They were trying their hardest to find internal jobs that two of us could transfer into. No one ever said "layoffs", but in these economic times, the writing was definitely on the wall. Anyway, through the genius of a co-worker, we now (at this point) don't need to downsize. He manages all the printers and plotters in the Houston area and economised our use of them. It would be a bunch of blah blah blah to you to explain exactly what he did, but suffice it to say it's saving the company around 200k. More than enough to cover 2 employee salaries for a year!

Thank you Heavenly Father for inspiring this man to do what he did!!! The stress of possible layoffs can be postponed for at little while longer!!!