Monday Already?!? (Warning: Long Post Ahead)

Wow, how time flies when you’re working/keeping obscene hours…

This weekend was the go-live weekend for the first phase of a major system implementation. In non-dork-inese, that means major computer system changes. Which equals a lot of hard work. While it wasn’t my team doing the work, it was Terry’s team and it affected some of the systems for which I’m responsible, so I got involved. In fact, since their changes meant that my systems would be inaccessible for a period of time, I seized the opportunity and did an upgrade of a system. Hooray for using someone else’s imposed downtime to achieve my own objectives! 😈

The upgrade was a pain. All was going smoothly until, halfway through the upgrade, the server crashed. Boom! Okay, restart, recover and continue with the upgrade. Whew! No problem. Except for the file that the server was working on when the server crashed. I won’t go into details, but there was only one person who was concerned about the upgrade and, go figure, it was her file that was affected. Okay, so I did some thinking, realized what the problem probably was and fixed it. No problem. Woohoo! Everything works now. Waited a little while for Terry’s stuff to finish up and went home around 10:00 PM.

That was Friday night.

10:00 AM Saturday morning – back in at work, but this time I’m providing moral support while waiting for the parts where I need to be involved. I stitched on my World Trade Center quilt panel until I was forced to stop because I was missing one color for the stitches and the backstitching color (after several hours, I was getting seriously sick of stitching anyway and had no “good” projects with me to capture my interest). Imbibed regular amounts of cold medicine. Brought my systems down so that they could do their work. Went to Walmart and picked up more cold medicine (I have a rant about that, but I’ll save it for later), plus some black and white floss (they usually don’t have either in stock, so yay!), but still couldn’t stitch because I was missing the one color for 3 teeny, tiny little bits of stitching. I mean, less than 10 stitches. Seriously. Did some web-based thumb twiddling. Had an IBS attack and was extremely thankful that there was no one else in the building (especially females). Left around 1:30 AM. We needed gas for the car. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a gas station in our area that’s open at 2:00 in the morning? Only 1 of the 3 gas stations on our way home was open. You don’t know how thankful I was to see a gas station that actually had the lights on! We didn’t absolutely need to fuel the car right then, but I didn’t want Terry to have to worry about it in the morning, because he was going to have less than 6 hours of sleep before he needed to go back to work.

8:00 AM Sunday morning – Terry headed back in to work for a 9:00 AM start time. I went back to sleep and completely overslept (I didn’t get up until after 1:00 PM), waking up with a headache because I’m a dummy. Logged in to work so that I could see how things were going. Periodically checked in. Spent the evening watching movies. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to stitch any more than the missing couple of stitches on the WTC quilt panel. I kitted up two new pieces to start, but couldn’t make myself start them with the guilt of the unfinished projects surrounding my stitching chair eating at me. Around midnight, I got the signal that I could bring my system back up and start checking for errors. I found some little ones and fixed them. Then I found a big one. And hey, guess whose file it was? Oh yes. That one. AGAIN. Now, at this point, you have to realize that I was tired and fairly grumpy. So I was conferenced in with these guys and I started uttering the F word. I told you I was tired. I figured out the problem… AGAIN and reran the necessary conversions. Everything went smoothly, so I thoroughly inspected every little nook and cranny relating to it and it looked okay. I’m just hoping that we won’t have problems in the future. I really should have pulled the file from the backup that we made before the upgrade, reupgraded it and rerun the conversion when I had problems with it the first time. That’s if I wasn’t sick of the whole thing. But I was. So I didn’t. At 2:30 AM, I finally decided to sign off and drag my weary self up to bed. The headache didn’t respond to two or three different medications. So, I popped another one and crossed my fingers. Set an alarm for 7:00 AM to take my migraine prevention med (this is standard) and went to sleep with a stuffed animal tucked under each arm, hoping to find Terry beside me when I woke up. When I closed my eyes, I saw what I can best describe as a lightning storm in my head. It was dark, as it should be with my eyes closed, but there were white stripes that flashed through. Some were in the background, some hit closer and were brighter and they seemed to correspond with a shot of pain in my head. It was interesting and yet disturbing. I’ll have to tell the neurologist about that one.

7:00AM – Monday morning – I woke up alone and with the same headache I went to bed with, so I took my headache med, my anti-anxiety med (this is a new standard, as a test for a month) and 2 Excedrin and tried to go back to sleep. 45 minutes later, still awake and full of anxiety (guess the med isn’t working or hasn’t kicked in yet), I crawled out of bed, put on a bathrobe and headed downstairs to log in again. Terry and the team were still awake (no naps, no nothing, despite Terry having taken the air bed with him) and still working. I started testing my systems again and doing some cleanup. In the process, I found another couple of little bobbles that I’ve now fixed. So, I went to work on the test system. More bobbles. More fixes. More cleanup. I watched people log into the production system. I watched their logins fail. I watched them get the customized error message telling them to change their password. Terry’s team watched them change their passwords. It’s all good. I went in and changed my own password, found some minor issues in that system that Terry then fixed. Hooray, I’m helping! (Sorry, botched Futurama reference there.)

It’s now 10:30 AM. I’ve been conferenced in with the guys since 8:00AM. They have been up for over 24 hours. They’ve been implementing, troubleshooting and problem fixing. They’ve been there to watch people in Asia Pacific come online. Then Europe. Then the eastern portion of the US. And finally, the western portion of the US. Terry actually expects to leave in about 30 minutes. Am I dreaming? Is he really coming home? I think I’ll run up and take a shower (so I don’t disturb him while he’s trying to sleep) and maybe put on a pot of water to boil so he can have some tea, if he wants it.

BTW, Terry has my cold. And so does his team. And after this stint, their bodies are going to be so rundown that I predict they’ll all be miserable this week. But hey, they knew it going in. They knew I was sick, they knew Terry would probably get it and they knew that they would eventually get sick, as well. However, to date, Terry has been in far better shape than I was. So, with any luck, this won’t knock him down so far as to cause him to get radically sicker (more sick?).

Now, THAT is what I call dedication to your work. Not me. Terry and his team. I was just along for the ride. But, those guys ought to get an award. But they probably won’t. Because we’re IT. And that’s what happens to us. People expect things to run, they expect things to work. We only hear about it when there’s a problem. Rarely does anyone get credit for “flying the plane.” Oh well. Such is the life of a computer specialist…