Last week my boss / CFO / landlord had to take off to Taiwan for a while to deal with family issues, and since then things have been pretty complicated at work and I’ve been running around putting out fires.
I’ve already written about the Microsoft debacle – and I got that worked out in a couple of days.
But while I was working on that the hosting company we use for the company website decided that now is a good time to phase out PHP 7 in favor of PHP 8 – which is totally legit, I just wish it wasn’t ‘right now’…
Anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem but our website is … contentious. See, when my sales team contracted out the design for the company website, the provider of said design took a $60 ThemeForest template, slapped in some stock photos, charged the marketing department $6000, and ran off giggling. And due to this I don’t have any of the ‘source’ for the website and have to reverse-engineer whatever needs to be fixed or adjusted every time it comes up.
The site’s template was developed on PHP 5.4 back in 2015, and I updated it all in 2018 for PHP 7.2 – which was a week of hell. And now we’re in 2023 and it was time to drag the thing kicking and screaming into PHP 8.
It took another week, but I was successful.
The roadblock currently is the COO wanting to have some testers test my work before I move the thing from staging to production, but continually spacing out that he wants this – so I’m on hot-standby to move the codebase around and the clock is ticking on the forced PHP upgrade…
Then on Saturday I get a voicemail from the alarm company regarding the alarm going off at the building… So off I go to get there and figure out what the hell is going on – which is perfect timing for the daily multi-car accident on Parker Road, so it takes me 45 minutes to drive 4 miles…
I get to the office and discover that it was a maintenance guy setting off the alarm because new tenants were moving into an office space on the second floor and no one got them keys. So I reset the alarm system and the new tenants catch me to ask if I can lock out the elevator for their movers a 2pm on Sunday.
I say “Sure” and make plans to be back at the office to use the elevator keys I’m not supposed to have.
Sunday rolls around, and then 2pm rolls around, and no tenant and no movers… She texts me to say the movers aren’t there yet and they don’t know when they will arrive. So I put the elevator into lockout and put a post-it above the buttons with instructions on how to get it to move, and bail.
Monday I get to the office early to fix the elevator so that the nurses on the second floor don’t panic when the elevator doesn’t arrive on the ground floor when they press the button. Monday is also when I’ve scheduled the door company to come out and to the maintenance on the big sliding glass door on the front of the building.
The maintenance guy arrives, does “stuff”, and leaves. Then at 17:30 when the building locks down it’s discovered that the front door will no longer open without an arcane sequence of events involving the door open switch that never worked and the motion sensor / mag-lock unit timing out after it sees you.
No one tells me this until Tuesday evening though, so I drive back to the office and try to figure out what the hell is wrong with the doors… And leave another post-it, on the door this time, explaining the timing required to get the doors open after 5pm.
And on top of this it’s fall in Colorado, so we went from weeks of high-80’s to high-60’s in one day – which was Saturday – and the building HVAC has never worked quite right and needs a lot of manual intervention… So since Monday I’ve been babysitting the Trane controls to try and keep the building comfortable.
Tomorrow I need to manually relight the boiler and get the heating system running as it took the building 5 hours to go from 68 to 72 today, and anything under 68 makes the aforementioned nurses cranky.
It’s always an adventure.
Listening to "Mixtapes" by Moonrunner83