am i in...two-thirds of a hospital room?

so it's 9:30pm and wouldn't you know it, i'm still fucking working. i swear to christ, every time i think i've caught up and can actually take a breath, god, or my boss, or whoever decides that i need a good slap in the face to remind me what an idiot i've become for thinking that such things are possible.

let me elaborate. earlier today, we noticed that one of client's backups had failed last night. uh oh. so as we check out the issue, lo and behold, they had the wrong fucking drive hooked up to the server. long story short, since the backup failed, we need to get one done asap. and since the backup schedule they were on was stupid for all sorts of logistical reasons, we decided that 'hey, since we have to blow away a ton of shit and mess around in their backup program, let's redo their schedule to make it work a little more smartly.'

well of course, their server is about as fast as a midget running in waist high water at the best of times, so running this backup during the day while it's under heavy use would be akin to being poked in the eye, with an aids-infected heroin syringe every second or so. needless to say, we decided (read: were told) that we would do it after hours.

of course i only have 8 seconds of free time a day lately so i figure what the hell, i'll volunteer; i'll rise to the call and do this all from home. (mistake number one). thinking it will only take an hour, two tops, i make plans to go for coffee with a friend who i've been sort of neglecting these last couple weeks, thanks to said job. (mistake number two). now, anyone who has worked with computers for more than a week in their life knows the age old saying that a certain mr. murphy penned, that goes something like "if something can go wrong, it will. if it can't, it's already broken." i may have added the second sentence on, but in my experience, it's held true, so i'm sticking with it. the drive that we make the backups to uses a connection called firewire, which i assumed theoretically should be faster than walking up the down escalator, (mistake number three....you see where i'm going with this) but oh boy, that would be just too much to ask. the backup (which encompasses a whopping 67 gigabytes of data) has now been running for just shy of 4 hours, and there's no end in sight.

this is coincidentally the last time i ever volunteer to do anything from home. i've had to cancel my plans for coffee, and now i feel like even more shit, not to mention the fact that it's 9:40pm and i'm still fucking working.

i don't see you crying, robot.