Tuesday, Tuesday why have you forsaken me. I really jinxed myself by reporting that Tuesdays are good days. The past two weeks have proven me wrong.
My Tuesday morning consisted of browsing through a pile of emails telling what is currently broken or appears to be broken. I don't consider myself a bad developer, but I consider myself incapable of pleasing everyone all the time or some of the time, most times I just want at least one person to be happy. Deploying applications on thousands of desktops across the country used by various users with various levels of knowledge intelligence skill to be used in thousands of different scenarios is not easy. It is much easier in a corporate environment where conditions are somewhat controlled, I cannot imagine what it would be like to have to build something used in the outside world.
Last week was all production support and now that I am done my monthly “on-call week”, it is a little quieter, but there is still a lot to do. Last week left me severely behind on at least six different projects and playing catch up is hell. Everyone is looking for a piece of me, every time I start on something, someone else is knocking on my door looking for an update. I understand that I dig my own holes, but sometimes I wish there was a reset button or a way to file workload bankruptcy, hell a pause button would be nice. I think I am incapable of working the hours that I used to. I burn out around 11:30 now and even the hours before that don’t seem to be as productive as they used to.
I got to leave work behind me early today (which is not a good thing being that I am already behind), because I had a doctor's appointment. It was my yearly visit to the dermatologist. Right after the appointment I had robotics, so I needed to take all of my robotics gear with me. That means I couldn't take the truck. I pulled the Subaru out the garage right after my wife left this morning and it sat in the sun all morning long. When I got in to head to the doctor’s, the windshield was covered with pollen, sawdust, and a mass of other crap. So I hit the windshield washer button and POP! The cool windshield washer fluid on the hot windshield caused a 10 inch long crack right down the middle of the windshield. I know this is in retaliation for not driving her for a month, but at least she could have given me a warning before self-mutilating herself.
I don’t think the patients in the dermatologist’s waiting room were too pleased with me when I arrived. I sat there for 15 minutes and must have sneezed at least 40 times. They all looked at me like I must be in the wrong office. I just smiled at them between sneezes and wiped away the snot. I got to meet my new doctor, he appears to be at least 14 years old. I then came to the realization that I am at the point in life where my doctors can actually be younger than me and that I am truly old. He gave me the all clear sign, which is good. He asked me if there was anything else and I began to inquire if they offer any euthanasia services, but figured our health insurance probably wouldn’t cover it, so I said “No” and went on my way.
On to robotics. I arrived a little late and had to park about 1/4 mile away. Everything was going smoothly until my cell phone started blowing up.
“you didn’t load the new such and such data last night”
“i did”
“no, you didn’t”
“I know I did because it took forever, it was like 9 million rows of data”
“well it’s not working”
At this point I realized that while I might have started the job to migrate the data last night, I don’t recall checking on it before I went to bed, so it probably threw an error at some point and never finished. I called into the “Henry F’ed up Party Line”. It was right at clean up time for Robotics, which is the loudest point with all of my kids asking how to save their Scratch projects and complaining because they didn’t want to clean anything up and running around screaming so I don’t even recall what was said on the call or what I might have said. I know I promised to look at the issue as soon as I got home.
As soon as I got home, I realized that I had to make dinner quick or we wouldn’t be eating until late. I went the pasta and meatballs route to save time. Everyone was fed and I headed down to the basement to fix what I had broken the previous night. I was right, the job failed to complete and I caused an outage, wonderful. The good news was that I found an easier way to run the job that went much quicker and the problem was resolved in about 30 minutes.
What a way to spend Star Wars Day. Lost was good, but sad. Fitting.
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