WooHoo! Moment

No … this won’t be an entry about “The Simpsons” movie that I have not had a chance to see yet. I had planned to watch it last weekend when I went back to my parent’s place but everyone else their plans for the weekend. So instead of watching the movie as I originally planned, we (my mum and sis) spent quality time on retail therapy where they finally convinced me to update my business shirts wardrobe. I am now the proud owner of shirts with stripes to wear to work! I guess I will get used to wearing non solid color shirts to work … eventually.

Today’s entry is about my own woohoo moment this morning at work.

My line of work mostly deal with me troubleshooting a problem that come up in our daily operations of supporting our client’s computers. Every once in a while, I get a problem escalated to me where no one in my team has seen before. When I asked around in my regional team, everyone has seen it bit no one knew how to solve it. Not being one to just ignore the problem, I decided to take on the problem and see if I can figure it out.

That was 3 days ago!

I have this tendency to latch on to a problem like a rabid dog and obsess over it until I can find a solution for it. It is the same whether it’s a problem at work or something from my personal life. I keep thinking about the problem and try to look at it from every angle to see if the solution was something that I have seen before. I tend to try to break the problem into it’s component parts and see if any components are the root cause of the main problem. Suffice to say that I can sometime be overly methodological when it comes to troubleshooting problems.

It was after mulling it over the weekend that I came to the conclusion that it might not be something that I can resolve. When I came back to work today, I was ready to escalate the problem up a level above me to see if they can make sense of it. Fortunately for me, I decided to give it one last try which was when all the pieces fitted together and I saw something that I had missed in my previous deconstruction of the problem. Once I found the key to the problem, the solution fell in place as soon as I thought of it. What was even better was that I was able to replicate the same solution across the board in Asia and will be sending it off to US and Europe if any of my counterparts there run into the same problem.

It was at that point of realization that I let out a spontaneous “WooHoo!”. I didn’t think it at the time but it was loud enough for my staff to look at me strangely. An outburst like that was not something common from me and most have not seen me before it that state. I guess the first thing that they must have thought is that I was overcame by a Homer Simpson moment but I couldn’t tell as they avoided my gaze when I turned to look at them. Slightly embarrassed as I was, it felt good to let the frustrations out even if it is in a form of a “WooHoo!”.

At least my staff now know that their boss is still human and wacky at times.