10 August 2017 - 7 days

I want to talk about the last 7 consecutive days. 

Day 1. Its a Friday. I wake up to over 80 WhatsApp messages from my team. The office has flooded over night. Its serious. We've invoked our business continuity plan. My team don't just look after Salesforce but all Business Systems. We need to ensure the business is up and running. It is. Part of my team have been up all night to ensure we're operational. I go to the back up office to offer my help. I end up playing the Receptionist as soon as the phones are back up and field calls. Missed career opportunity. The business is functioning within a few hours of a major disaster. We did OK. The CEO mingles with the affected staff in the office in true Blitz spirit. We chatted and he asks if the CPQ project go live will be affected because of the flood. No, we're in the cloud. We can make this happen. 

Day 2. Saturday. I go to a family event. Fabulous location, lovely people, except for one person. Out of nowhere he calls me a dumb blonde. I make my excuses and head to the bar. He is spoken to and apologies to me. But its one of those apologies where he's been told to do the job but doesn't know why or care. So I tell him he was disrespectful to me. He responds by swearing at me and I have to confess at this point I too used some Anglo Saxon back at him. This incident was hurtful as I am a natural blonde and for all my career I have had to fight these type of cavemen and their attitudes. I'm hoping one day it will stop.

Day 3. Sunday. We start our deployment of CPQ to production. No flood will stop us. The beauty of the cloud.

Day 4. Monday. We battle through our deployment as its a bit of a beast but we finally get there and I'm pleased to send the go-live email out to all the users. The CEO replies back with congratulations. 

Day 5. Tuesday. One team member is full time on flood response and has been full on it since the first drop of water. The rest of us aided the wider team with the glamorous job of clearing up soaked desks and removing personal belongings into boxes to be reclaimed. One person had 9 boxes to their name. How can you have that much stuff?

Day 6. Wednesday. More flood response work, this time clearing kit from desks and managing the spaghetti that is cabling which all needs to be removed as the whole area has been condemned, over 70 desks affected.

Day 7. Thursday. I'm kind of relieved that I went live with CPQ in a quiet period. It enabled us to help with the flood and answer the few queries coming in. That night was the office summer party and fortunately it still went ahead. There might have been glitter and I may have got 'on-brand'. I don't know about you but do you always get people coming up to you at parties and have a 'just wanted to ask you something about Salesforce' moment? It happens to me all the time. What's really frustrating is when you get someone who wants to moan at you, tell you some functionality isn't working and how its rubbish. Yeah, that really picks up my mood; especially when I investigated the issue the next day to find the gripe was due to a human process error and not a functionality hiccup. Someone wasn't paying attention during the training. 






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