Thank DOG it’s quittin’ time…

You guys won’t tattle on me, will you? Didn’t think so…oh my stars and garters, did I ever have focus issues at work today. And yesterday. And the day before that. And also the day before that. And…wait, have we gotten to Monday yet? Because it’s been like that all week.

Seriously, if someone were doing a documentary on the most severe cases of adult ADHD ev-ah, they should have been around my place this week. It got to be seriously annoying, because, you know, daydreaming and thinking a zillion things at once and constantly sidetracking down “interesting but rather besides the point” mental alleys and all like that can be groovy…but not when you don’t want to be like that.

Although I did get a groovy “missing account lookup tool” out of it, when one distraction led to another and another and another then suddenly I found myself building this Union Query Of Doom where you can put in your account number and, if it is in any of our whackity-majillion source feeds, it will not only tell you precisely whence it came, but why it did not wither-goeth unto whereunto ye thought it oughta-eth.

Because, uh, that happens rather a lot. “Where’s this account? I can’t find account XJ942YRU774!” And then I end up going through this tedious process of finding out which source feed it is in (and then it’s in there as 000004-XJ942YRU774) followed by the even MORE fun process of trying to weed out exactly which of the 427 constraints was “the” constraint that caused it to get kicked out of the system. (My personal favorite has got to be when I get to say, “Dude, this account was closed on February 22, 2006.” Because really? You’re freaking out over an account that has been dead, Jim, for over four years?!)

But now, see, I have this nifty little screen, and I just copy and paste the account number from the email, and it runs through all the different possibilities including the possibility that I’ve only got a partial account number (I’m rather proud of that…it’s not 100% foolproof, but so far it’s been spot-on) (I so clever, I scares m’self) (no, really, it kind of scares me that I’m so charmed by my account-number-parsing-and-pass-to-join-solution), and then if it finds a hit it runs this sub-query that runs all the account flags through in the same order as the load process until it hits whatever would have first knocked it out of the load.

And then, it tells you in English what happened. “This account was not in scope because it is a child to parent account 000001-XJ942YRU774-07Q, Ixsnay Warehouses DDA.”

Booyeah! Just saved myself I-dunno-how-much time down the road. And eventually maybe I can deploy it out to the reporting site and they can look up their own darned missing accounts and leave me out of it. While I go on to do more important things, like looking up Thai chili chicken recipes.

Because missing accounts => tying up my time => I really like Thai food => ya know, wasn’t there a Thai chili chicken that was like KFC meets Singapore I saw once…?

…three days later, I emerge from my bedroom gimlet-eyed and spouting all kinds of facts about how to grow chili peppers.

Seriously, people. What is going on with my biorhythms this week?! I’m always a bit (a bit?!?!) (shut up, me) prone to this kind of stuff, but this week has been bad even for me!

In unrelated news (you expected something else?), have you noticed a trend lately where real estate listings are using pictures taken years ago, like, as in, from the last time the house was sold?

(See? This is what I’ve been dealing with this week. It’s like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride inside my skull.)

I hadn’t noticed it either. But then I went online to get the confirmation number on a bill pay, and I was all, Ohmygah, I drove past that house the other day and it does NOT look like that anymore! and then I went all surfy-surfy and checked out the pictures of other pretty run-down places I drive by regularly and found that about three times out of a ten, the real estate agent was using a picture that so did not reflect the way the house looks now…but made me think of what it looked like back in the boom days – you remember, two whole years ago…?

Oh. How did I get there from getting an online bill payment confirmation number? Welllllllllllllllllll…see, it was something like this…

Bill payment confirmation =>
paying off bills =>
paying down mortgage =>
being upside-right on Den again =>
being able to sell the Den if we wanted =>
if I had twenty fertile acres, what would I grow =>
wonder what the going price is for tomatoes, berries, corn, wheat and potatoes right now =>
farm search =>
real estate listings =>
what are places going for out here these days / just how upside down are we now =>
AAAAAAH, MY EYES, MY EYEEEEEEEES, SAY IT AIN’T SO OHMYGAH WILL THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL NEVER END?! =>
…waitasecond, I know that place, only the weeds are a lot higher now, aren’t they…

Sigh.

I am so glad it’s after quittin’ time on a Friday. Maybe a nice weekend pulling weeds, cheering on my paver-laying hubby and conniving a few more square feet of garden space (oh yes, there has been conniving going on) will get my head back in the game.

Either that, or I’ll spend the whole weekend right here, endlessly distracted by just one more link on the Internet…

{click!}