My husband has just gotten home from picking up our seven-month old daughter from daycare. Once I finish my work for the evening, I check on them.

Me: “How are we doing in here? According to the daycare app, looks like she hasn’t had a diaper change in a bit?”

Husband: “Looks like it. Mind taking care of that? I’ve gotta start dinner prep.”

Me: “Sure – all right, kiddo, let’s go check the damage.”

She and I have gotten maybe ten steps when she projectile-vomits over herself, me, and the floor. I yell for [Husband]’s help, and over the next thirty minutes, we get her changed and bathed, I get a shower, and [Husband] cleans off the floor. After we’re all settled, [Husband] and I both agree that neither of us feel like cooking now, and we order dinner from a local place that does Nashville Hot Chicken sandwiches.

When [Husband] comes back from picking up the order, he pulls out a cake slice from the bag and says:

Husband: “It’s for you – consider it a “I’m sorry you got puked on” present.”

I know this man loves me, but extra gestures like this make it even more obvious.

I am the type of person who believes that dreams have a meaning, especially recurring dreams. Lately, one of my dreams is similar, but not quite the same: I keep dreaming I’m married, but they are all different men. I am telling my dad about these recurring dreams, and this happens:

Dad: You’re married to different men? Not at the same time, I hope!

I burst out laughing and assured him that no, I am not married to more than one man in each dream.

This is a story about how a fellow co-worker cost the company we worked at $40K and he got to keep his job. This happened around 2010.

My manager approaches me with an urgent issue to look into, I’m to drop everything I’m doing and figure it out; since I’m the senior Tier 2 tech and I get the hard problems or ones that need immediate attention. The handful of tickets I can’t resolve or need specialty work are moved to the Tier 3 technician and they handle the off-the-wall odd stuff that takes a long time to pinpoint the problem and devise a resolution and if he can’t fix the issue it gets handed off to programming to look into things.

Anyway, I pull up the ticket and read through the initial notes left by the my manager. Apparently a new store location has not been getting credit card sales data reporting to the credit card company for end of day batches and this has been a problem since they opened 3 days ago. The customer here is missing almost $50K from their bank account and need to know why this is happening. The twist is, credit cards are online and functional and approval codes from the credit card company are being supplied. I can connect to the store and do a few “dummy” CC transactions and I get approval codes from the CC company that are legit – I called and confirmed from the CC company that the approval codes provided are tied to the charges I made.

What this means is that credit cards are getting the initial approval from the CC companies that cards are legit and can be charged for payments the customer is requesting – so an approval code is provided to hold the money. Once an end of day is ran, those approval codes are batched out to the credit card companies, matched up to the cards that were used and money is withdrawn from whatever account the cards are tied to. Then that money from the batch process is transferred to the vendor.

However, the batch out process is not completing correctly – it is running, but something is getting lost in the process. In the end, all those approval codes are not getting batched at the end of the day and no money is being pulled from customer accounts to make payment to the vendor. People that have been making purchases from the vendor will see a “pending” charge on their account if they were to check, but after a few days the approval codes expire and the funds are released back to the customer.

I start digging through configuration settings and confirming the CC software is configured correctly and pointing to our customer’s bank account correctly. I had to confirm with the bank if the end of day I ran for the dummy transactions have shown up – they have not. The several dollars of dummy sales I ran are not batching correctly…..huh.

I go back into all the log info and there are no logs. No data is posting to the logs. I test a couple more dummy CC charges and nothing is generating a log. If no logs are being generated, no batch file is actually being generated.

I pull up the work ticket for the store installation job and I see another Tier 2 from second shift name on it. I read through his notes and nothing looks out of the ordinary. So I end up waiting for the Tier 2 tech from second shift and I have him show me exactly how he want through and installed the software.

I found out that he wasn’t installing the software correctly – he needed to follow the instructions on the installation guide. He was installing the software in the wrong folder in Windows and when everything for the CC software generated folders and data in the registry was created, it wasn’t lining up with the folder locations for data to be stored and logs to be generated.

I found how he did this on 4 other stores that he installed a few nights ago, but thankfully those other stores hadn’t officially opened doors yet so we could fix the issue before it became a problem.

I had to go back through and uninstall the CC software on those 5 stores, but with the install being done in the wrong place on the system I also found I had to scrub the registry by hand to get the software to correctly install and function as it should with generating logs and batch files

Our customer ended up being out just shy of $50k, but after working with ownership at my work, they agreed to settling the issue with us paying them $40K to cover lost credit card sales.

Even after mucking up the installation process of the CC software and costing the company $40K, the Tier 2 tech got to keep his job without any kind of repercussions. The only process that changed was myself, one other senior Tier 2 and Tier 3 techs were only allowed to install and configure credit card software.

In college, I attend a small Tuesday night church service on-campus. Since we’re in a campus building, it’s expected that we might have a different event just across the hall, but since our room has doors and the other is closed in by glass, none of us are worried. The glassed room is rarely used at the same time we’re holding a service anyway.

One night, we actually do have a group in there. As we’re trickling in and doing our name tag routine before heading inside, members of the other group strike up conversations with our people. Everyone is friendly and polite, and it seems like it’s going well. I go inside to check on some of our tech, and when I come out, the whole group is gone.

Me: “Where’d the other people go?”

Group member #1: “Oh, they left.”

Me: “Really? What about their event?”

Group member #1: “No idea.”

Group member #2: “They seemed really uncomfortable being just across from a church, so I guess they went somewhere else.”

To this day, we have no idea who organized the gathering, what they were planning to do, or why having a casual church service going on behind closed doors across the hall was such a hang-up for them.

It’s my first day of kindergarten. I’m ready to jump in headfirst, but my mom is nervous, since I’m her oldest child and took two years of preschool due to being the smallest kid in the class. We’re in the carpool line.

Mom: “Do you have everything you need?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Mom: “You know where you’re going?”

Me: “Uhh . . . I think so.”

Mom: “Do you want me to walk in with you, just in case?”

Me: “Just drop me off, Mom.”

She did, then hid behind the sports equipment shed with all the other first-time parents to make sure I got in all right. “Just drop me off, Mom” became such a family in-joke that it was the last thing I said to my mother before she went home after helping me move into my college freshman dorm. I still say it sometimes if she ends up driving me somewhere.