All my Troubles Seemed so Far Away

Yesterday was a good day.

I woke late, had a quick yummy breakfast and went to work.  A data move I had started, so that I could swap out some weak hardware for something better, had gone sideways.  It's done methodically and carefully (by the computer) so there was little risk.  I killed it, waited for the SCSI system to recover, and started it again.  Ideally, I'll be able to empty out the hard drives without an outage, if all eventually goes well.

But I wasn't there for that; I was there to test and calibrate a UPS in the remote work site.  It's funny how, after my ITIL course a ways back, things slowly drift toward a more ITIL-ish method:  for this UPS calibration we'd set the outage time, mailed some people, worked a back-out or recovery plan, etc.  Nothing fancy, but if we're the pros we should sometimes be professional, and I guess if we killed the UPS it would've sucked, right?  Heh.  Anyway, that went well enough:  didn't get the result we wanted, but we rolled everything back and didn't lose or interrupt everything.  And ITIL isn't about being as OCD as possible, but in establishing a framework that works and then using it.  So go us.

Then I hacked.  I modified a bit of code here, some code there, pushed out the updates, maybe grabbed a candy bucket or two, and that was almost it.  It was a very relaxed day, punctuated by the occasional chat online, or locally with a cat or a human.  I can't pick out anything disastrous about the day, really.  Did I drink to forget it and succeed?  I think I didn't, but I can't remember.

I just thought I'd post that, even if almost none of it has anything that most of you can latch onto:  even with me glossing over the details, it's still too techy for most of my lived ones to do more than dip a toe in, and I'm mostly okay with that.  Yes, I'm still working at a job that's so bad that one guy tried to kill himself onsite, and yes, said job just one a freakin' award for being a great job to work at, which makes sense as "number of people tried to kill self in last year / two years / next year (predicted)" was remarkably absent on the questionnaire when it went around.  Same for "people sent home to France directly into extended psyche care" for stress, I guess, for the sweatshop would fail that one too.

The key point is, I wasn't there, yesterday.  And I was producing.  And I was in a relaxed environment conducive to work, with people and cats and animal crackers, or whatever people have at home.  And I'm sure that went a long way toward me having something resembling something relatively like a good day, and I thought I should share as much of it with you all as I thought would be interesting.  So if I get fired tomorrow - like I almost did last week - at least we'll always have Sunday the 23rd of October.