It’s been a hell of a week. Actually, it’s been building for a while, but now we’re in the thick of things and that explains why I’m a little behind on posting.

It all started with the tiny little decision (don’t these things always start with just a small thought?) that we would upgrade our Macs (including the one  at work) to the newest operating system, Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, apparently Snow Leopard is not compatible with Quickbooks, our accounting software (I’m pretty sure I heard an “oops!” from the makers of Quickbooks, who are on our shitlist now). It corrupted our accounting program, causing us to immediately need to convert all our data over to something more stable. Words so casually spoken…

Will did a ton of research, found a great professional (read: complicated) program, and 4 weeks ago, started making noises that this was going to be a big project. I started paying a little more attention when he began spending 4 hours each day of the holiday vacation at the office dealing with putting in patient lists, and inventory, and whatever, all in the goal to get this done by January 1. Fat chance of THAT happening, even though I started coming in over the weekends as well, doing inventory.

Will kept sounding like the Voice Of Doom, saying again and again that if we didn’t get this done (and he was mainly talking to our office manager) we were going to really pay later. And yet… he seemed to be the only one worked up about it.

Right around this time, our office manager started to finally implode, from a couple of months of long commutes, a college class that was kicking her ass, night after night of 3 hours or less of sleep and surviving on Red Bull, cigarettes and little else. And now, 2 weeks into the year, we’re still wrestling with this nightmare program and she’s on sick leave for a week, minimum. While I love her like the daughter I never had, I also want to just scream, “You didn’t think the rules applied to you??!” You know those rules – the ones about eating and sleeping and stress? Yeah, those. NO ONE IS EXEMPTED. Let this be a warning.

She’ll be back, hopefully next week, but in the meantime, this hellish program is giving me chest pain. We finally got the patients info entered, the stock names entered, the actual inventory entered, the starting balances of things and God knows what else, but in the meantime, 2 weeks of work have piled up, so we’re entering that as well, but OF COURSE it’s not that simple. This patient bought a Cleanse? But you don’t technically have any in inventory to sell, even though I see 5 on the shelves, so it won’t let you go forward. All the charges had to be specific Mastercard OR Visa OR Debit card, so we had to pick through piles of receipts to match them to the transaction. We found stuff not entered (yet), lab tests not specified, just LAYERS UPON LAYERS on stuff we have to plow through to get this done. If you’re off by one cent, you can’t move forward. WE WILL, AFTER ALL THIS, HAVE THE BANK RECONCILIATION SKILLS OF WARREN BUFFET. If that’s a good thing ;-)

And when it’s all done, we finally get to do payday, ANOTHER large, time-consuming task. We’re already late on that, just for the record. But soon, we’ll have computer check-out up front, a DREAM for our office manager who wonders how we keep adding things up incorrectly, even with a calculator ;-)

All this, just because we wanted to upgrade our computers. Believe me, I’ll remember this next time.

On the other hand, I’ll be thankful I’m sitting in an office.