Almost every working day I get a churning feeling inside my stomach whenever it is time to leave home for work. I’m not sure if it is because of what I eat for breakfast or if it is something psychological. Perhaps something inside of me is repulsed at the idea of going to work on the first day of the working week, after a weekend full of spiritual and social activities involving family and friends. I’m sure it must be something subconcious since I come to work with neither a feeling of excitement or dejection. I come to work thinking “today, this is what I am going to try to accomplish” and I follow that with a list of things to do. Today was a bit different. Sure, I still had that churning inside my stomach, but things seemed to look brighter today.
I arrived at work with a slight feeling of excitement, because last week I finished fixing another test coverage bug on the Transport code. Although I finished fixing the bug, I did not wait to see the results of the fix. The test build takes about 35 minutes, and having finished the bug fix at almost five o’clock on Friday, I decided to kick off the test build and let it run to completion without my presence. “I will check on the results when I return on Monday”, I thought to myself.
Today is the day I get to see the results of my work. Nothing much to be excited about for a normal person, but I’m a geek, and geeks get excited about these things.
I came in and a colleague of mine is back in the office. I was covering for him last week, while he was away on business. I returned the blackberry device to him, and he informed me of a problem on one of the servers that we maintain. We discuss the problem, and resolved it. It was 10:00 a.m. An hour passed and all I did was return the blackberry to its rightful carrier. Oh, and did someone else’s job.
I sat down at my workstation, and discovered I had over 300 messages over the weekend. Most of it was spam that got through my spam filter. I deleted the spam messages. It was 1:00 p.m. Now I can start my work. The phone rings. It was a Sun engineer working on an escalation, something about the FRU provider on NetConnect. He gives me very sparse details on the problem. I tell him to contact the customer to see if the problem is persistent, and if it is, determine the root cause, and re-assign the escalation and bug to the proper group. But wait, that was standard procedure which he should have known. At least I got out of doing his work for him.
Now I can get back to my e-mails. Several of my e-mails (those that were not spam) were about something that went haywire of the weekend. I checked on that, called the other sysadmins. None of them were returning my calls. I noticed a discrepancy in the DNS records of our systems, and attempted to resolve them, but different documents had different ideas of what the records should show, things were so confusing, that I inadvertently disabled a production URL. No big deal. A sysadmin finally called me to tell me of my mistake. Problem solved. Now I finally got a hold of a sysadmin and discussed the weekend issue with him. The events of the weekend did not have adequate explanation, but we resolved the problem. Now I can start my work. Oh, wait, it’s 3 p.m. I need to eat lunch. No turkey sandwich this time. Quite delicious even though it was left overs.
Now I can work. It’s 3:30 p.m. But before that, I had a few e-mails last week I needed to attend to….hmmm… where are those e-mails… I guess I should really clean up my mailbox. 4:30 p.m. mailbox cleared and messages filed properly into their respective folders, and necessary replies have also been sent to those e-mails which I put off last week.
I need a break. I’ll write about my day in my blog. Oh look, it’s 5:20, time to go home. I still have to start work! I guess I’ll start tomorrow.
-- Posted in Journal
