Friday, July 31, 2009

How's that for a day off?

Because of being gone for a week last week, and being gone for another week next week, and both of them being for work reasons, I decided to take an extra day off this week. So, that was today.

Silly me for thinking that it would work out that way!

You see, we have 32 people interested in leaving for our mission trip on Sunday (which, by the way, we're heading out at 4am. Seriously? 4am? Ugh.). However, we only registered for 30 spots. This is probably something that we should have talked about and figured out prior to the week before leaving for the trip, but it is kind of par for the course with the way things have been going.

Anyway, so today on my day off, I had to call the organization we're going through to see if there were two extra spots available. Well, I guess at that time it was 3 spots because we had 33 potential people going. So I called to see if they had three extra spots available. Well, no they didn't. And they don't allow any overbooking at their site in Denver, which is where we'll be heading. So the kind and helpful person on the other end of the phone suggested we call the other churches to see if they had spots that they hadn't filled that we could buy off of them.

On my best day I am not a fan of talking on the phone. I don't really know why, I just don't care much for it. So the prospect of talking on the phone to these other people on a day I wasn't planning to work at all didn't seem like such a fun idea. So to avoid it I sent an e-mail to one of our other adult leaders to see if he'd be able to do it, but then it occurred to me that he's at work and we should probably get going on this as quickly as possible. It looked like I would need to be the one to make the phone call. But then it hit me. Aha! Church secretary! I ran over to the office and talked to our secretary about it, and she said she'd be willing to make the phone calls. So I gave her all the info that she'd need, my user name and password for the organization's website so she could access the info about the other churches to call them.

Then I left to grab some lunch and buy a couple things at Target. On my way the secretary called and said that the info I gave her wasn't working. It wouldn't allow her to access the site. So I repeated the info, and she said that's what she had. I asked if she was exact with the capital and lowercase letters, because it's case sensitive. She said she was. I said maybe I wrote the password down wrong and she should go look at the post-it note I have stuck to my computer monitor that has the password on it. She said she had already done that. I was baffled. I had been on the site earlier this morning and it worked. Our other adult leader had been online last week using that same info to print off some forms. I have had this info for more than two years now and it has always worked. I couldn't imagine why it wasn't working now. So I told her that I would come into the office to figure it out when I got back.

When I got back into the office she had figured it out. She was putting a space in my user name where there shouldn't have been one. I was relieved to see that was the problem.

Well, to make an already long and uninteresting story a little shorter, after calling the various churches we found four unused spots that we could purchase from these other congregations. And in the midst of this, one of the high schoolers who was going had called me earlier to let me know that he would no longer be going. So now we only needed two spots.

So I was able to enjoy my day off with only three stops in the office and a couple more phone conversations with the secretary. But I guess that's what I get for thinking I'd take some extra time off right before we head out on a mission trip. Maybe tomorrow, my actual day off, will seem more like a real day off. We shall see.

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