Last Friday the 13th

I am not superstitious that's why I wore my wedding gown before my wedding day and had my pictures taken while I was pregnant. (This reminds me of a former colleague, who is now in the UK, who got pregnant and because she's superstitious stayed out of the camera's lens for fear that something may happen to her baby. She went full-term with her pregnancy but in the end gave birth to a stillborn baby.) I have lived through a lot of Friday the 13ths but last Friday was different.

I tried to wrap pup our stocktake/inventory last Friday by running an inventory report but the system wasn't running. All other functions of our library system were working except for the reports and so I wondered what I was doing wrong. I attempted to run the reports a couple more times when I noticed I already spent half an hour just trying to schedule a report that gave me the same negative results. This was when I decided to seek the help of a senior librarian.

When I approached her with my problem, we walked through the process I've gone over earlier and tried to generate reports just for the sake of it and got the same results. Then we looked at the other reportst that were supposed to run last Friday and noticed that not any one of them generated any results. Just to make sure, we rang a colleague who scheduled a circulation report earlier and asked whether she got any results ang got a negative response. It wan only then that we concluded that somthing was wrong with the system. I left the report generation at that seeing that I couldn't do anything to fix it because if was certainly a systems problem.

I completely forgot about this incident as the day went on and while I was waiting for my train home reading a freely circulated tabloid (like Inquirer's Libre), I saw this article about Friday the 13th. Interesting....

So I thought, has Friday the 13th brought me bad luck or was it mere coincidence that technology simply failed me on that particular day? I guess I'll never get to find out because just this morning, the system was working fine and I was able to generate the report I needed.