So Worth It

Please note the beautiful number on the above screenshot: 10006!

Two weeks ago, Mike, my boss' boss, mentioned in passing that his birthday was today and that a wonderful gift would be to have 10,000 titles online. Tianna pointed out to him that we were a long way from this being possible, but then thought better of her pessimism. So, without Mike's knowledge, we decided to try and see how close we could get. T sent an email out to all of our sites, and everybody agreed it was a great idea and that Mike really deserved it.

So we had this goal: get approx. 2,000 more books online in two weeks. (This is as many books as is sometimes done in a month.) Everybody knew about it but Mike, and we all worked really hard. Earlier this week, T and Annaleise decided to put their other duties aside and Kofax so we could get as many books ready as possible. I also Kofaxed, but a lot of time was taken up with loading the books that were ready, as well as the traumas I went through with computers and software.

T and I both stayed at work until 7:30 pm on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday trying to get this done. Who knew that sitting at a computer could be so tiring? But when you do it for so long, it surely is. On Friday, I didn't even go in to work until 12:30 pm because of the extra hours I'd worked earlier in the week. But once I got there, it was even more hectic than I had expected. I was Kofaxing books, as well as loading finished books online. I was in Orem, but I remoted into my computer in SLC so that I could load from both computers at the same time. I loaded into 4 different collections that day (just to add to the mayhem, we had to start new collections, identified by different numbers starting that day). It was a lot to keep track of, and I confused myself thoroughly several times. Tanna was confused, too: at various times throughout the day, we thought we had already achieved our goal, realized we hadn't, and thought we couldn't. But then we did! Finally, about 7:30 Friday night, we were able to see the beautiful sight I've included atop this post. The only task left was to tell Mike.

We dropped by his house on our way home, and decided to tell him that there was a problem and we needed his help. If he had a computer nearby, Tianna said, we could show him. Of course, he was highly uncooperative and wanted to know the details of what had gone wrong and how he could help. Finally, however, we got him to a computer and were able to show him the stats. He was completely shocked! He just sat there for a couple of minutes, mouth wide open, looking back and forth between us and the computer screen. Happy Birthday! He was dumbfounded, and we spent another 20 minutes or so explaining how it had come about. And he agreed that not only had we gotten him good, but it was a wonderful birthday gift.