Well, that was unproductive

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

I didn’t do much yesterday but lay around and read ancient Dave Barry columns.
Well, I fixed a longstanding problem with Debby’s site (debugging PHP code is such a pain when the curly braces don’t all line up) and I returned a batch of car fuses I bought a couple of weeks ago that it turned out I didn’t need. Six bucks is six bucks, you know. That’s lunch for two days if I’m careful.

Other than that, I took a nap. Actually I might have dozed off twice. I don’t remember. It was a tough week. On Monday I got paged at 11:30 at night with a tape backup problem and ended up having to go in to work to fix it. Tuesday was quiet. Wednesday and Thursday I got paged late. How late, I don’t remember. But late enough that I’d gone to sleep. Wednesday’s problem I fixed remotely. Thursday’s problem might or might not have been fixable remotely, but the operator kept talking about blinking lights on the tape drive (it’s an internal drive, and I’m convinced he was referring to the blinking lights on the hard drives) and multiple blinking lights on a tape drive usually indicates big trouble, I ended up going in. I stumbled through the problem and finally went home. It wasn’t a hardware problem.

On Friday one of my coworkers took a digital picture of a tape drive for me so I can ask pointed questions about the blinky lights if when the problem comes up again. Looking at the picture, now I remember: blinky lights on the left is big trouble. Blinky lights on the right is highly unlikely, so I guess that’s even bigger trouble.

On my way home from Promise Keepers on Friday, I told my buddies I fully expected to get paged that night about a tape backup problem. They all thought that was pretty awful. I got home, plugged my work laptop in and booted it up, intending to be pre-emptive. I didn’t want to get paged at 1 in the morning and get told a 9:00 backup job failed–not when I needed to be at church at 7 in the morning with an 11-hour day (minimum) ahead of me. As I was firing up pcAnywhere, my phone rang. It was one of the operators, and a backup job had failed. I went in and fixed it.

But, seeing as I didn’t sleep more than six hours uninterrupted any night this week and operated two nights on four (I know, when parenthood comes I’m in trouble, but I really work best on 7 hours during the week and 8 on weekends), I slept in yesterday. I was late for church. The 10:45 service. Pathetic, I know. Then there was a post-service meeting I’d forgotten about. Oops. So I was there for two hours. They mercifully cut it off at two hours. I was out of fuel and was getting irate at the weird questions some people were starting to ask.

Then I came home, got irritated that my SWBell e-mail still isn’t working (six days and counting–makes me wonder if they’ve ditched their Sun equipment for Windows NT), tried to remember how to set up my own mail server again, decided it was too much thinking, and took a nap instead. That set the pace for the day.

I’m hoping this week isn’t a repeat performance of last week.

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