I arrived at work later than usual today because I took my work computer home before the holidays and forgot to bring it when I left for work today. I drove home, retrieved the computer and drove back to work, pulling into the company street at 9:15. I was worried I would be stuck in the dreaded overflow lot--a space the size of a football field that is located somewhere on the MN-IA border. Luckily there was still space in the far corner of the third parking lot from the door and the shuttle was sitting there waiting. I've heard people say that if you need to come in after 10:30 for any reason you may as well wait until 11:30 and grab a spot that was vacated by someone leaving for lunch.

I thought I would be busy today but I had two meetings cancelled because people were sick and I had to reschedule another meeting that I had called. People have taken a lot of sick days in the last month for themselves and to take care of children, mostly due to a virus that has slowly circulated through the building. My manager has it now.

A new time tracking tool was introduced today. Anyone who has ever been forced to do time tracking knows it's very annoying and time consuming. Time tracking software seems to be carefully designed to be slow, ugly, hard to customize, and prone to crashes. I suspect there's an international organization of time tracking software designers that publishes strict (bad) standards and does user testing to make sure people can't use the software. They may even whack people that turn out a good product.

Is our new time tracking software any better than the old software? It is less ugly than the old software, which looked like it was created by some manager's eight year child. It's also a bit quicker than the last software, which would take so long to refresh the screen after a save that I would just go to another window and do something else instead of waiting.

How well does it work, you ask? Hoping that it would work they way it LOOKED like it worked, I carefully set up my projects so they would become defaults. I pressed the save button and......it deleted all my projects. I reentered the projects and then yesterday's and today's hours and saved again. It reloaded briskly with all the information intact (projects must have hours assigned to them to be saved) but then I saw it--they made the screen less cluttered by taking out the total fields. I have to add the hours for each day and the for the week in my head!!!

Thank goodness--they followed the (bad) standards. Now I have countless hours of time tracking fun to look forward to!