Friday, July 07, 2006

Menstrual and Working...

Wading in a sesspool of hormones and getting my behind kicked on the new job does not seem to go quite like mashed potatoes and gravy.

7:30 a.m.
First, I don't want to go in at all. I'm tempted to stay home, and Jeremy is looking at me like puppy who doesn't know why his owner was mad. He doesn't move: "Baby, do you want me to leave you alone? What can I do?" Absolutely nothing. Worse, I don't deserve you being so sweet to me when I know later I'm going to curl up in a ball, won't let you touch me and make you feel totally rejected. But, I sludge into my backpack and say: "I'm ready to go."

8:10 a.m.
I go to work. I've left my security badge at home, which burns up another couple of minutes of fruitless searching and results in ultimately signing up for a temporary at the main desk.

8:20 a.m.
At my desk, I dock my laptop and log in to find literally thousands of error messages from the database I've been recently made responsible for (last week). I check my cluster: both cpus are maxed at 100% utilization. Also, my data-loading drives are close to 90% capacity, expanding quickly. It's a grim choice: save the data, or keep the server from crashing. And I'm not sure I can pull off either one. I actually elect to save the data, devoting my efforts to developing a script to migrate the largest files elsewhere, anywhere for later loading.

My manager comes in. He's understandably stressed. He promises to identify the cpu spike if I continue working on saving-the-world-I-mean-data scripts. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, and he knows it. But he doesn't care, because *anything* would help at this point.

Blurr-O'Clock - bedtime
The rest of the day is spent ignoring my disaster of an inbox, and writing scripts. I solve one problem that causes another and then fix that problem... which of course breaks another process essential to our database that I never knew existed. Fantastic.

8 hours later, Jeremy and I go home. He says he likes my new brown shirt, but I feel fat.

... At least it's the weekend. Woot. I'm officially devoting the next two days to reading the news and mindless trivia until I pass out. Fun :)