Excuses Number Two and Three

Today's post will be a second installment of excuses explaining why I didn't blog for so long. Yesterday's excuse put the blame on camping.

Today's excuse will be blamed on work and a lack of privacy.

Although I did have a portable Internet connection with me, I ended up spending the bulk of the Labor Day holiday, and all of the following week, working. My original plans were that I was going to take off early Friday, work from the campground that day, and enjoy a nice three-day weekend.  I'd planned to work from the campground Tuesday-Friday, and then  enjoy another weekend, already set-up and ready to go.

But things didn't work out that way.  Something I'd been working on was launched on Thursday against my express advice.  It's always a bad idea to turn anything brand-new out of the barn on a Friday because people want to have their weekends off, and it's even worse if you do it right before a holiday.  I'd suggested we wait until immediately after Labor Day, but my advice was ignored by the powers that be.

Things started to go really wrong when the campaign we launched resulted in more than forty times the number of responses we expected on the first day.  For every customer we expected, we had dozens more who patiently waited, and even more who gave up and walked away in frustration.

Needless to say, my client's customer was not pleased that we were so woefully unprepared.  On the bright side, our lack of preparation wasn't entirely our fault.  The sales results we were given from last year's program didn't reflect the overwhelming response that we received.

I spent the weekend fixing things, re-allocating resources so that we could handle the load, and by Tuesday morning, the mess was considerably better.  The overwhelming initial response had died down a little, and we had been able to allocate more resources to handling the unexpected rush.  I spent the rest of the week sweeping up the remnants of the mess, preparing reports, and performing a postmortem on what went wrong.

By the following Friday, things had calmed down sufficiently, and I got off work about an hour early.  At that point, I needed the weekend.

Needless to say, since my work situation was completely out of control, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about writing blog posts.  When things were a little quieter, I did think about posting, but it seemed that whenever I wasn't working, I had an audience.  Although FosterEema obviously knows about the blog, my kid, my real-life friends and my family don't know about it.  It's my little secret, and I am trying to keep it that way.