I'll supplement this story with a tale of my own.
I happen to work in the field of electronics, as a field technician. I shan't say what exactly I do, I'll save that for a latter story.
Either way, me and a partner, we go to this apartment building today, and we need to do some work in a bunch of suites. As it happens, the management of the building screwed up (for the second time in a row), and had set up access for
Monday, not today (#1).
But, as it so happens, the management was about to call for service today (since we "weren't coming"), so we were told to accommodate. As it turns out, we had to do some stupid work for another contractor (the elevator company) which, although easy, was boring (#2).
So, then, eventually we got to get to our own work... but, the elevator contractor wasn't done with us. He needed us to hook up a wire from his elevator doohickey into our equipment (#3), but we weren't expecting to run cables today (#4) so we had to... make do (#5).
So, then, we want to do some of the work which we were originally assigned (it's about 12:30 at this point), as there was a few things we could do that didn't involve going in-suite. About 3 seconds into this, we discovered that another technician at our company had bypassed a bunch of stuff because of a ground fault (see Note 1 below, or just assume it's bad) (#6). Guess which pair of mis-worked techs get to trace it out and fix it? (#7)
As it turns out, there was no less than 3 ground faults on our equipment, one caused by the same technician that bypassed it (#8), one caused by the moron who installed our equipment (a long time ago, a latent problem) (#9), and one caused by another moron who installed something else near by (#10).
Eventually we find these problems, and fix them. It's about 1:30-2:00ish by this point, and we still haven't done anything on the original work order. We decide that, come hell or high water, we're going to get some
real work done.
Then, the elevator contractors (#11) come back, and need us to do something else for them (#12).
The rest of the day was fairly mundane, so I'll gloss over it, and skip to the drive home: 2 hours, for a 40 minute journey (#13).
Oh, hey, 13 bad things on Friday the 13th...
Note 1: A ground fault is where a wire is touching something it shouldn't, i.e. a pipe or an electrical box or something. It means that the voltage going out from the power supply isn't coming back, and left unchecked, it can cause any number of things to go berserk in electronic equipment.
Note 2: I deliberately left out 99% of the indications of which field I work in. As I mentioned above, I'm sure I'll get around to telling you guys at some later date...
