I found out the easiest way to get out of work: Bring our email system down on a Monday
Our email has been problematic over the past 2 weeks. We've been experiencing delays of 30 minutes to an hour before emails would come in from the outside world. Before this time our delays were roughly 5-10 minutes which seemed reasonable. During a problematic day these delays took an upwards of 3-5 hours and basically crippled our office for the rest of the day. This wasn't bad though since it was towards the end of the day on a Thursday.
Today I come in to our email being completely down. We can send email inside the office fine (duh, it doesn't leave the mail server) and outbound email is pretty instantaneous. Within seconds of sending email from my account to hotmail, MSN pops up saying I have email which is how fast inbound email should be but isn't right now. Inbound email from the outside world is not getting in to us at all, period. Most likely there's a delay in the system and it's well beyond the 3-5 hour mark that it was on that day a couple of weeks ago.
I've not gotten a single thing done that I planned to do today. Why is that you ask? Because practically everyone in the company has proceeded to come into my office every 30 minutes or so to ask me the status. If they don't come by the office, they call and when they hear I have no status they proceed to make sure I call and get them a status immediately. Since the problem is beyond my control, I'm not at liberty to say exactly what is wrong or give an ETA to when it will be resolved. The sad part is this is constant and even if it's made perfectly clear that it's not my problem I must be bugged about it every 5 minutes as if it was.
I'm not worried about the whole ordeal it's just annoying. I find times like these make it easier to remember that being an IT manager/whatever for a small business isn't fun, rewarding, or exciting. Sure I get to pick and choose the technology I learn and it makes a wonderful resume builder but managing said technology is a chore. I don't have the luxury of buying expensive commercial products to take some of the crap out of my day but I'm doing better about managing it. Needless to say I don't see myself doing this for very much longer even though I have nothing to fall back on at the moment.