Such a Day

Morning:
Should be a simple work process. Make change to database. Run code generator to reflect changes. Push changes into current software development. It took me four passes and nearly two hours, instead of the simple twenty minute job I expected.

Afternoon:
Just about to start on new section of work, when I get an urgent email. Accounting department is saying that credit card payments are not appearing in their system. Our application seems to be processing them, but the actual payments have not been showing up for nearly a week. There is over $23,000 in credit card payments that have effectively vanished. This is not good. Spend the rest of the afternoon identifying, verifying, and fixing the problem. Good news #1: it was not my code, nor the fault of anyone on my team. And honestly, it was a simple configuration error that anyone not intimately familiar with that service (read: me) would never have noticed. Good news #2: Although the payments were never processed through the live system, every single missing transaction was logged in the database and can be recovered. Still a little cleanup left to do tomorrow morning, but by lunchtime all will be well.

Evening:
Take my mom to the grocery store, and then to the drug store to pick up a prescription. Previously this particular prescription cost $7 for a thirty day supply. Her insurance plan changed as of the first of the year, but it should have been roughly similar. Instead, the prescription cost $75. This is not good at all. Call the insurance company, identify that there was a computer glitch (the prescription was showing up as non-preferred instead of generic-preferred). They straightened it out on their end. Called pharmacy, they ran it again, and confirmed that the correct copay is $0.00 for a thirty day supply. That's free, as opposed to $75 per month. I dig free. Turns out that on the new plan, one of her other regular prescriptions also has a zero copay. I really dig free. So we need to go back to the pharmacy tomorrow at lunchtime to do a return/exchange to have the $75 refunded, but it's all good.

Also, booked a flight for my mom to be able to go back home to Seattle in March to see my nephew perform in his first play (he has been cast in a community theater production of High School Musical). She is very happy. Happy is good.

So now it's midnight, and I am still awake. This is not good. I've been having problems with insomnia again lately. I just took a sleep aid. Hopefully it will kick in soon.

Slightly more than I thought

So that twenty three thousand dollars that I was dealing with yesterday? It turns out the actual total of lost transactions was over $134,000 or more than five times what I thought it was. Almost a hundred credit card payments appeared in every respect to have been processed correct, except that they never really happened. Thank God for accountants, who noticed within a few days that the actual payments were never showing up. This would have been exponentially worse if it had gone on for weeks instead of days.

In any case, all of the corrections have been made. Customers are being contacted to explain what happened, and to be reassured that they are not being double-charged (each transaction automatically triggers a confirmation email telling the customer that their credit card has been charged, so all 98 of these transactions will trigger a second email describing the same charge happening a second time).

So there's half of my day gone, with no development accomplished. Ah, well, them's the breaks.