Retiree

So this morning went as usual: I arrived at work around 7 a.m. with my small, soy white chocolate mocha in hand. I entered my office, turned on the computer, and logged in. But when I tried to open the office's network email, I couldn't log in for some reason. I decided it must be a fluke and instead tried to open one of our database systems to enter some data. To my surprise, I couldn't use that either. I figured the server must be down or that the computers had been updated and thought it might work better if I just restarted my computer. I did so, and was shocked to find that now I couldn't even log on to my user's account. Even more astounding was the a notice window popped up saying "Your account has been disabled. Please see your administrator for help." So when one of my co-workers got in, and paid her a visit and told her my problems. She pulled up a program and found my name. After a three-second pause, she said, "Huh, that's funny."

"What?" I asked.

"It says here that you're retired," was her reply.

I leaned forward from my seat and craned my neck around to view the screen; sure enough, I was listed as retired. It turned out that when I was changed from a "temporary employee" (through a group called Temp. Services) over to a "Pitt student employee" (same thing, but paid by someone else), the computer system was never notified and therefore decided my time here at UPMC had expired. I still can't figure out why it chose to do it that way though.

While I was waiting for my request for an account to be processed, I decided to walk down to the hospital and collect some data for the study. My dad, who works there, happened to be just leaving his office, and we had a chance to stop and talk. "So guess what?" I asked him, "Apparently, I'm retired!"

"Wow," was his response. There was a pause, then, "sooo....do you get a pension?"

I laughed and explained to him what had happened and that it was being taken care of while I was out. He sighed, and with a laugh said, "Sure wish I could retire!"

So now I'm back to work. Nothing's changed, just what the computer says. Though I feel a bit of that rush that Brett Favre must have felt the x-number of times he's come back from retirement. LET'S DO IT AGAIN!