I’m sitting here at my computer at home. I should be relaxing, or enjoying the time off. Instead, I have my work laptop online and sitting next to my main PC’s monitor, and am using it to communicate with people at our Canada location regarding system issues.
This has been par for the course for this entire weekend, pretty much.
It didn’t help that last week was plagued by long days due to power issues at our main facility, and the need to replace network switches at another facility. (Network switches have to be replaced after-hours because we can’t afford entire sections of the network to go dark during business hours.) I had hoped for some time to relax this weekend and catch up on sleep. Of course, I knew that plan was partially doomed when I learned that the power would be out at our main office for part of the day Saturday. That meant I would need to go down there to make sure everything would come back up after power was restored.
Saturday got to an even earlier start than I had anticipated. At around 6:45 AM I was contacted due to a problem with the security system at a facility. I got that taken care of, but by the time I was done there was no sense in going back to bed. I eventually left for the office, made sure all the systems were back up, and then headed to our datacenter to swap out backup tapes. Once that was done I made my way to Louie’s; he had gotten a Playstation 3, and had picked up the full Rock Band set. We played that and Guitar Hero: Rock the 80’s for a while, went and got dinner, and then went back and played a bit more. It was fun, but we did come to a realization: Dave’s going to be our drummer. ;-)
(I also had to get gas before I left for the office. My request of the oil/gas companies? Knock it off already. Seriously.)
On Sunday, I got woken up AGAIN to another support call. It turned out that there was a power issue at the building where our datacenter is located, so I ended up needing to make a drive down there to get our servers operational. It was a severe annoyance, especially when I found the problem wasn’t with our equipment but with the datacenter-provided equipment. That was two hours I could have done without having to waste… heh.
As far as today goes, I was once again woken to people from work contacting me. It’s kind of understandable, considering the Canada branch doesn’t have today off, but still… meh. I’ve gotten everything taken care of for now, but I’m going to end up keeping my laptop on the corporate VPN just in case I need to do any more support work.
In any event, I’m just glad it’s a four day work week this week. I’m hoping that it’ll be a little quieter than last week, but if what I’ve seen so far is any indication, I’m not expecting it to be. Ah, well. I’ll just finish out this day relaxing the best I can, and do my best to deal with the rest of the week. :-)