Vacationing

The goal of this vacation is to end it without feeling as if I need another vacation in order to recover from this one. I give myself a two out of five chance of making it. I already feel a tad guilty because I won't be around to 'support' three significant activities that my company is doing; I put it in apostrophes (wonder if the second part of that word comes from the same root as 'trophe'?) because my support is minimal; I just hang around to see if something breaks. And I feel guilty because on the very first day of my vacation something actually did break and they had to call the backup to fix it. Well, okay, thats what backups are for, but this is MY system, and I don't like other people touching it. And then the next day it took me about twenty minutes to dial into a system from my mother in law's house, so that by the time I was in, the damn system was already up and I couldn't see what I wanted to see. Plus, when I was IMing with one of the people on site, they told me I'd forgotten to do something as part of a change last week, and it caused them a problem. Not a big problem, but I don't like making mistakes, particularly ones that other people can see. Bad enough when only I know about them.

On the other hand, the system that I was dialing in to watch came up in 11 minutes, which is pretty phenomenal, as it had been coming up in 14-19 minutes. We had speculated that it needed more capacity, and so we did it, and hey presto. The buzzword is 'took the cap off'. But then we put it back on because the customer insisted that we do it. It drives me crazy when we do things we know are stupid because the customer tells us they want it. Who's the computer geeks here, us or them? Not that I'm as much of one as I want to be, and I probably never will be, either -- this may well be my last job, or at least, my last moderately well paying one.

So I needed a vacation. Thus far, 65% of it is booked with Activities, some of which involve the massive use of gasoline. Argh, what timing.

I need a vacation.