Monday Morning

We seem to have arrived at Monday morning. It is both better and worse than I thought it would be.

The better is that I slept pretty well last night, even managing to get up in time to cook breakfast. I like doing that. Granted, I was a little shaky on what happens when -- its generally a better idea to add hot water to the waffle mix, not mix in the water and then microwave the whole damn thing -- and we did run out of sausage, but those were minor things. I doubt anyone's Monday arrives looking like a beautiful day unless a) they don't work, b) they work on weekends, or c) they love what they do. I'm going to assume those people are insane, and let them be.

The worse has multiple components.

I got up at about 4:50AM on Saturday, by the table alarm clock, and noted almost immediately that my watch said it was a little after 12AM. Nothing good can come of finding this out at that time. Fortunately, I do have another watch (its my 'classy' watch, black with no numbers, which I wear on the rare occasions that we go out, and I want to signify that I am 'dressed up'.) so I was able to survive. What is it about having a watch that, if you're not wearing it, and you turn your wrist and look at where the watch should be, somehow satisfies the need to look at it?

My suspicions about the need for me to be at the customer site yesterday were if anything understated. Not only didn't they have anything to discuss, there was a great deal of initial confusion because a power hit had taken out their local LAN, knocking out the first step in their linkage to our mainframe system, not to mention, the voice response units that they used for automated customer inquiries. Turned out that they didn't have connectivity to the internet, either -- they'd said they did, but what they meant to say was If you have our firewall software on your PC then you can connect to the internet. This meant that I could not connect to my company's network, hence the instant messaging system, which was the whole reason I'd brought the laptop along. (At least I didn't bring the work laptop, which is heavier, had a battery good for about thirty minutes, takes literally five minutes to boot up, and runs slowly.) So I got to sit there in a warm state office, staring into space, for about five hours, including time waiting for the guy who was on call for the voice response units to sprint right into the office to restart the servers. Took him about an hour to get in, and about five minutes to do the restart. Guess the concept of 'remote restart' is beyond them. I shouldn't be surprised -- the level of technolgy here would make a marketing guy weep. Their parking garage, incidentally, charges seven dollars for five hours or less. Fourteen dollars for more than five hours. I was there for five hours and twenty three minutes. Thanks, server guy.

On Saturday morning I'd applied software license keys for a product used by one of our customers, feeling a little bit pleased because I'd gotten them. Turns out, though, that the format of the keys had changed, so they actually had problems till Sunday evening. They did try to page me, during the period when I was in at the customer's office, but I never got squat -- which was a double fluke, as I don't normally wear the pager on the weekend anyway. Apparently the other people in my group wear it all the time, which I think is bizarre -- and in this case, useless. Once I found the problem, I fixed it, but now its Monday Morning, and all of the MM Quarterbacks will be suiting up.

My wife and daughter got home safely last night, after taking an hour longer than the trip should have due to multiple delays. Somehow my daughter got a really bad sore throat, to the point that she can barely talk this morning. I gave her a note to give to her teachers, saying that she had a sore throat and was hoarse (I had to keep myself from writing the note to say a 'soar throat and a horse voice', so maybe I am still tired) which she appreciated. Not sure if she'll use it, though.

I have a meeting at 9AM to talk about the weekend, and one at 1PM to talk about some incomprehensible audit stuff, with people who Really Care about that sort of thing.

And the day is young !