Be careful what you wish for....

Which, granted, is a very lame phrase even if Uhura did say it in Star Trek IV to that snarky ensign who ended up getting locked into the closet.

A few days ago, I was whimpering about not having enough to do, and how I wished I had more, and yesterday, the opportunity came. I got a call around 1:30 to the effect that a customer wanted a piece of software installed, and how it would be appreciated if I would do that. And oh, yes, they'd like it operational when they came in on Monday. At that point, I said 'Did they mean the Monday that is in one day, or the one that's a week from this Monday?' And you know which one they said.

I spent about three hours on the PC, downloading the package from the vendor's site (really glad I was doing this from home, with the cable modem; had I been doing it at the office, with the anemic network we have there, I'd still be doing it today). And talking with the customer, and the vendor's contact for my company, and the vendor's contracts person, who is the keeper of the sacred datecode, without which, you can install all you want, Jack, it isn't going to work. But after about two hours, I thought I had it knocked, no problem. Then I learned that when the vendor had changed from version 5.1 of their software to 5.2, they had made Substantial Changes, which translates into You Have To Reinstall The Whole Package. Oh, fun!

After trying to upload to the mainframe for a while, I tossed in the towel and drove into the office, where it took about two more hours to get the upload completed. Things went pretty well at that point, and by about 9PM I thought I was done. I'd say Start, the product would come up, spit out all kinds of status messages, say 'Ready'.... and then shut right back down again. Not being too bright, I tried it about fifteen more times, and each time, same thing, except that sometimes it'd kick out error messages, too, like 13E abends, which say that a subtask hadn't quite finished running when it was told to shut down, or errors from Unix, saying that a task was ended even though it hadn't been undubbed yet.

Finally, an hour later, I thought, hell with this, and called the vendor, telling them what I was seeing, and the guy said well, the only time I've seen this before, the TCPIP port you're using is already in use by another task. So I renamed the port to something else, and, hey presto, it came up.... and stayed up. Damn!

Fooled around with it a while more, entered some commands just to see that it really would respond, then I called the person who had originally asked me to do it (taking some pleasure in the fact that I was calling at 11 at night), and told him it was in, it was up, I was done. Which pleased him. And I then shut down the laptop, put it away, and thought "Damn. Forgot to shut down the task." So I called Ops, asked them to shut it down, and, after some confusion, because they'd never heard of this task before (obviously, since I'd just built it), they did, and I went sleepily home.

Be careful what you wish for. Someone might be listening.

But you know what? It was fun.