My blinking babies

[spookyload]

So I get the brilliant idea to start a new program in our flying squadron. Weight and balance has always been a time consuming process for my job. It is a twenty to thirty minute ordeal with lots of number crunching and pencil and paper flying everywhere for every flight. Last month I got wind of a PDA program that will do it. I downloaded it, installed it onto my PDA and it was marvelous. Same output in two or three minutes of pointing and clicking. I quickly sell our commander on the time saving program and drag him into the 21st century.

Flash forward to Monday of this week. The order I placed through the squadron from HP arrives unanounced. 55 HP Ipaq's that made the salesman at government contracting for HP's sales month show up in my office while I am at lunch. Brown HP boxes everywhere. It is a tech buffs fantasy to walk in on. Now the problem is I get to teach 45 loadmasters how to run the software. That is easy, but I first have to charge these things and install the program on every PDA.

Needless to say I am sitting in my home office surrounded by little amber blinking LED's from the second batch to charge today. 26 little babies all around plugged into power strips in my office. I finished the first batch a while ago. Luckily the program installs from an SD card so it is just a matter of adjusting the touch screen, setting the time and running a .cab installer from the SD card. Takes about five minutes to do each one and repack it in the HP box after charging.

The lesson here is never think what seems like a great idea is ever as great as it seems. The program will be wonderful, but will end up costing me about 10 hours of my time at home to set up the PDA's this weekend. I didn't think about it at the time, but I should have taken a picture of all the HP boxes in my office. To top it off, HP sent an extra Ipaq outside the inventory. The little devil on my shoulder is telling me to keep it, but I know I will end up calling HP on Monday and telling them.