Friday Night Party, Hockey, and Dancing

For a week that started off with a fire at work the second day of classes (Wednesday), a system not working correctly on Friday, the week ended great Friday night. It was a hectic week and extremely busy at work. However, Friday night definitely helped to relax and meld away the problems of the week.

Yes, we had a fire which was caused by a fuse blowing in our mechanical room. This happened sometime around 7 am Wednesday morning. This was the second day of classes and not a good start to the day or the semester. Our entire machine room (i.e. the campus) was off of the network for about three hours. Finally around 11 am we had partial systems back and before long our network administrators had most everything back on-line before early afternoon. Meanwhile, we were handling the calls and complaints coming in from the campus. Keep in mind that no one had Internet access on the campus. So, everyone was relying on the use of the phone or personal visits. Fun stuff! For the problems that were caused by the fire, the department handled everything in stride and got things going smoothly again. We received a number of thank yous from the campus the following day. Very nice!

Friday morning was not much better with another system that was not working correctly. The system just so happens to be the one that allows employees to do their time sheets, students to register/drop/etc. classes, and a variety of other functions. This caused a lot of phone calls until about shortly after the noon hour Friday. For the day, we took a total of just shy of 100 calls. Now, that might not sound like a lot, but for a call center that averages around 30 a day, that is a lot for us.

My plan for this past week was to work on a lot of projects including writing up performance evaluations. All of that was put on hold until this next week. I did end up working late Thursday night so I could finish up some projects that were due Friday. Good thing I did work late Thursday night because I would not have been able to worked on those items Friday.

So my Friday night started with me requesting the students to leave the lab so I could close down the lab. Carrie and I were to meet our friends at the Expo Center for a Republican party... we were mainly going to drink free alcohol. I was very stressed out from the week, but who can pass up alcohol. We were only able to enjoy the party for about an hour. We were then ready to head to the Topeka RoadRunners hockey game. We had a blast!

The game was exciting enough with the Roadrunners winning 5 - 2 (or something around there). There of course was a fight with some blood, but that's not what this blog is about. This blog is about me dancing between quarters at 60s disco night.

I volunteered under the understanding that I had heard someone shout that it was couples dancing. I thought Carrie and I were going to dance together and then get voted on... No! It was individual dancing to 60s music. As you can imagine, I was hesitant at going through without, but by that time I had already signed the waiver. In case you were wondering, the waiver is so that if I fall on the ice and break a limb, I do not hold the Expo Center accountable. After signing my life away, I got up to follow the event staff to my dancing endeavor. While walking in front of my friends, I told them I thought it was couples dancing and they just laughed. I continued following the event staff to the location down by the ice. While standing waiting for our time to go on the ice two little girls and a little boy with a 60s outfit came down to be included in the dancing. Another contestant and I looked at each other and said it was all over, we already know who is going to win. Sure enough the little kid with the 60s outfit won the event. No, I did not give up right there and go back to my seat, instead I did my dancing and strutted my best 60s moves on the ice.

My moves included the moon walk, lawn mower, and do not forget the sprinkler. I did in fact get a good applause at my dancing. We only had to dance for thirty seconds and with the spotlight it was difficult to see the audience. My friends got a good video of the dancing which I will hopefully get a copy of from them to post on here. It was a lot of fun, but the kicker of it was that our price for performing was a ice cream from a local store. Gee, thanks! I am not sure what the little kid won for winning the whole evening, but hopefully it was a banana split or something a little bigger than a ice cream.

I had a lot of fun and it did definitely help to improve my mood going into Saturday. Afterwards, we went to a new spot here in Topeka called Henry T's. If the name sounds familiar to those of you from Lawrence, it should. It is owned by the same people that own Henry T's in Lawrence. Great food and a great time there too.

Have a great weekend and try to have as much fun as me!