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.

damn the man, save the empire

this morning i was late for work. not a single 24 hour period after having a conversation with the female parental unit about not waking up, and i of course denying that i could ever sleep in, it happened. never mind that i also ran out of shampoo leaving my hair somewhere between rat's nest and emo kid. never mind that it took 3 tries just to get my car to start. i was late for work on my second goddamned week.

i feel like absolute shit. i'm trying my hardest to show these guys that i can handle whatever they throw at me, and then i blow it by sleeping in. no, i wasn't incredibly late; maybe 45 minutes, but the fact remains that i pride myself on always being on time, and being late makes me feel like the lowest of the low.

anyways, i should get back to work. i'll try and update again later on today when i have something more to complain about.

go flames go!

we got a jizzack up in the bi-ox

another day gone, and another breakdown avoided. to be fair, today was actually a fairly good day. i had my ticket queue down to 4 at one point (and 3 of those were waiting on quotes to be signed) and it's only gone up by another 4, so i'm feeling pretty good about myself right now.

there were a few points today where i was getting a little overwhelmed, but unlike the past week and a bit, i'm finally starting to get into the groove of actually being able to do work vs. acting as a glorified receptionist in the past. i've learned a lot over the past week and a half, and i'm finally starting to allow it to all sink in and actually utilize it.

basically in the last 8 days of work, my brain has been overloaded with new processes, new software packages and new people. it's stored everything for safe keeping but really hasn't been able to process anything as there has rarely been time for anything more than a "have a good day--" *ring ring* "thank you for calling ..." while not necessarily a bad thing, information overload is a real thing, but thankfully the cloud is starting to lift and the little sun rays of sanity are starting to creep in again.

anyways, it's officially 5pm, meaning that if i was fred flintstone, there would be bird squawking at the top of it's lungs, and i'd be sliding down the back of a brontosaurus. so i will update tomorrow and if i cry, you guys will be the first to know once i get out of the psych ward.

suddenly dypsy's eyes shot open and fixed on tinky winky. tinky winky didn't dare move, until with a sigh dypsy spoke: again again!

you ever have one of those days where it sucked so bad, that you begin to wonder if it actually happened or if your mind is just trying to make fun of you for being a pussy? yeah, yesterday was one of those days.

when i started my new job last week, 2 of the 3 guys i normally work with were on holidays. so that meant work-work-work as we were incredibly short handed. this also meant that when this week started, i'd be greeted by two new guys, who have a very different sense of humor. now i don't mean "different" as in "thinks dead babies are funny" or "lol hitler" but i mean "let's haze the newbie by not only having him deal with his outstanding issues from last week and taking every fucking call that comes into the helpdesk (including a dead backup drive and 2 server rebuilds) but also all our outstanding issues too. let's see if he cracks."

well i made it through the day without ending up in the fetal position, crying that i miss my mommy, so i guess thats a good sign. i didn't try and slash my wrists with a pink, plastic razor with a daisy on it and a moisturizing strip, so i guess that's a good sign too. what i don't think is a good sign is that this was even allowed to happen. our boss seems really awesome otherwise, but just trying to see what the new guy's breaking point doesn't seem like a cool thing to do.

anyways, it's now tuesday, things have been fairly quiet today, save for a client who was running their only server (which acts as a database, e-mail and file server) with 1.7mb of drive space. i've had some time to catch up on everything from yesterday and am feeling pretty confident that if yesterday was some sort of twisted test to see if i could survive under the toughest conditions, i passed with a pretty decent mark.

oh, i also got paid. that kinda helped too.

tell me the first thing that comes to mind: pork umbrella

something is very wrong with today. so many things have happened today, that i'm starting to wonder if god got sick of looking after everyone, and decided to play a game of pinball with my sanity. let me explain...

7:00am - a screaming sound is emitted from the floor of my bedroom, in the general vicinity of my alarm clock. while normally it is something of an obnoxious (but apparently effective) cross between a buzz and a siren, today sounded like the spawn of satan himself was attempting to remove himself from the very device he created. it sounded absolutely nothing like it normally does, and may have infact have been the screams of the damned. scaring the piss out of me so bad i actually jumped about 3 inches off the bed, only to land 1 foot to the left and subsequently 2 feet lower than my mattress which happens to be the general position of the hardwood floor next to my bed.

ok, so no worries, i'm only sweating more than rita macneil in an ironman competition, at least i'm awake. so what if i might be for the next week as well? i get myself ready by showering, still a little shaky from the doomspeak emitted not minutes earlier. i plug in the iron, do some running around the house, grabbing the things i need for the day, etc. i come back to the ironing board, reach up, grab my shirt, place it on the ironing board, and go to grab the iron. it however, is not where i left it. now, at first i thought "my god, perhaps the screams from my alarm clock were the screams of the damned and they have possesed my iron. maybe it has grown legs and a face and a tail and a sinister little grin and has coarse little hair that covers it. maybe it is currently taking over this city with nothing more than a small army of blow dryers and electric razors and the mayor is preparing to declare a state of emergency for all mankind." however as my foot started to feel less and less like its usual ice-blocky self and more and more like a the surface of the sun, i started to wish it was the former.

after hopping around on one foot, down the hall, up 7 stairs, trying to find something with a sub-zero temperature to numb the 8 nerves left on the top of my foot, i managed to get back to the ironing board and accomplish the original task i had set out to do. that's not to say i didn't burn myself again, because i did, many times in fact, but these mini-burns (or "burnettes" as i like to call them) were nothing more than a nuisance which were simply followed by a "goddammit!"

7:50am - after finally getting through almost an hour of agony, i get in my car. "but nexxai," i can hear you ask, "wherefore art thou headed at such an early hour on a stat holiday? dost thou have an emergency?" oh no. no emergency. i'm just going to work.

wait a second.

work? on arguably the most important holiday of the year? the one where we remember those who fought for our freedoms? one and the goddamned same. those freedoms that were fought for in both world wars, seem to only have allowed us to become the ultra-capitalistic society that we are today. now don't get me wrong, i love being able to earn a wage based on my skill as much as the next guy, but i don't think we should be abusing it and trying to fix "omg my e-mail is down and the porn won't come through, it won't come through!" issues, or "my num lock key is broken; the light is on but the keys aren't doing anything" problems. it just seems like we're pissing on the graves of those who lost their lives in battle.

7:58am - here's where things finally start looking up. i get in the elevator and notice the sign saying that the hvac system is going to be off all day. hot damn! i don't have to wear 2 jackets, a sweater, a t-shirt, ski pants, 3 pairs of slacks, and nasa-approved heated body-underwear today! no more trying to blow hot air into my hands to try and regain feeling in my fingers. maybe this day won't be so bad.

9:13am - a co-worker calls. when a co-worker calls, it's bad. they don't call to ask about the weather, or what was on the tube last night. turns out that we're doing a microsoft windows small business server install and the discs are scratched. dammit.

after frantically calling all of our other clients near where he was to obtain a copy for the time being and finding none of them open for business on a goddamned holiday (whodathunkit?), we start running around the office looking for a set. while neglecting to look in the only binder labelled "microsoft - sbs2003", we started freaking out. (for those of you playing the home game, "sbs" are the initials to "small business server", coincedentally the exact same product we in fact were looking for.) after looking around it, even under it, we finally realized our blunder and high fived each other in a vaguely homoerotic display of affection. [ed. note: some of the previous sentence may or may not be true.]

in true nexxai fashion, i then left darren all alone on the helpdesk, hopefully armed with enough knowledge to avoid any critical disasters, and i rushed downtown with the binder full of cds. also in true nexxai fashion, i also made it all the way downtown, and back to work in a land speed record of 20 minutes. taking into account that we are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 110th ave, and the discs had to be delivered to 11th ave, i'd say i made pretty damn good time. i'd also say with a fair amount of certainty, that i have now unofficially volunteered myself as the new internal delivery boy.

[ed. note 2: holy crap this is getting long.]

[ed. note 3: after being "distracted" by work, i've lost my rhythm and can't write anymore. plus it's now goddamned sweltering in here and focusing is taking way too much energy. suffice it to say that today has been a rollercoaster of emotions, and with there still being 9 hours left of the day, there's still a damn good chance i might end up in full blown hysterics at some point. keep your fingers crossed.]

i've got a couple things on my mind, and sex isn't one of them. what are they?

dj simon future - reactive radio 11-08-2005

1. tilt - new day (david west remix)
2. dj tarkan and mert medeni - on the way (original mix)
3. dominic plaza - sounds rushing (original mix)
4. charles and kling - abysmal days (brahma mix)
remix of the week:
5. andain - beautful things (markus schulz shadows of coldharbour mix)
6. john o'callaghan - resolutions (original mix)
7. denga and manus - cenwen (vengeance mix)
8. angelstyle - oceancreme
9. miss ann - intercepted
10. gabriel and dresden - serendipity
11. probspot - swedish cowboy
12. stel and good newz - second chance
classic of the week:
13. mike foyle vs. signalrunners - love theme dusk (signalrunners sunrise mix)
14. ernesto vs bastian - dark side of the moon (dj shog remix)
15. whiteroom feat. amy cooper - someday (enmass remix)
16. angelstyle - insider
17. gleave - lights out

my give-a-damn meter is broken

well as some of you gathered from my post yesterday, i have started a new job. it's not the most glamourous job, i basically support the network and all applications for about 100 different small businesses. one of them, who i will refrain from naming for the time being, is our biggest client, who basically make up about 90% of our issues.

their biggest issue of the last couple days is that some of their reporting programs created in crystal reports are breaking. specifically, the applications are failing to connect to the database server, thereby preventing the retrieval of some pretty important data. this also is occuring after a complete network rebuild which was done on friday night, and after the cio of the company decided to restructure the file server where these reports are run from.

i can hear you say it now: "why don't you just open up the code, find out where it's referencing the database server and replace the old location with the new location?" well that would be a great idea, had the original creator of these reports done any of the following: a) written any documentation regarding these applications; b) left the code for these applications to allow us to modify them, should we find the correct settings; and/or c) not quit from our company, leaving no contact information.

it's situations like this that make me hate the world of i.t. yes, in the past couple years, documentation has become a big issue with the advent of the enron scandal/sox compliancy, easier to manage knowledge repositories (such as wikis, microsoft sharepoint services, and the like) and just the fact that applications are getting too large for a single person to maintain them, forcing developers to create knowledge bases if only for their own team. however, applications that are more than a couple years old, either do not have adequate documentation, or the documentation that does exist was written after the fact by some combination of using it and making notes along the way or reverse engineering the product and hoping that you can read assembly.

at any rate, i'm getting sick of it. in my opinion, documentation should be as important, if not more so, than the application itself. so long as you can let the users/support teams know what the application should be doing, the application will survive, as there will always be developers available to you that could read said documentation and correct any problems. however, if you're leaving it up to the support team as an exercise in figuring out how you're creating a connection to a database, you should be taken out behind a dumpster, and beaten with a 4u sharepoint server to get it into your head that not everyone can read your fucking mind; not everyone learned how to code the exact same way you do.

at this point, i'm ready to throw in the towel and go back to school for something else. stuff like this happens on a daily basis. developers who create even the smallest program think that "oh, it's just a teeny program, no one will ever need to know how to fix it" are kidding themselves. if you're involved in the creation of any application that is used by any business, you damn well better make documentation, because you may not be involved in it, but that application might need to grow, and if i don't know how your shit works, rest assured, i will hunt you down and it will not be a pretty sight.

now where is my goddamned latte?

and they're off to a flying start at today's twenty-first annual dog and llama show

it is currently 1:59pm on a monday. i have now been awake for just shy of 8 hours. something is terribly, terribly wrong with that statement. for the past few weeks, had i said "it's 1:59pm", i would have been awake for just shy of 8 minutes.

yes, today is my first day of work at my new job. while i could think of better things to do with my time, i am getting paid for sitting this chair, so i guess it's not all bad. the guys i work with are pretty cool too; they seem to know their stuff, which is good seeing as how they've just thrown me in and expected me to know how each of our 100 client's networks are set up.

my only hope for today is that i can walk out at 5pm without actually falling asleep walking out to my car. getting up so early this morning has left me somewhat on the sleepy side of things and is causing me to have to really concentrate on focusing my eyes, even when i'm just trying to read something simple, like this post for example.

at any rate, assuming i'm not always stuck behind this keyboard every day (which i've been assured i won't, but am starting to think that was a lie), i think it should be a good job. i'm absolutely sick of helpdesk positions (i've been doing phone work for the past 6 years, so i think i'm allowed to hate it) so any work that doesn't involve me talking to (l)users on the phone is welcomed with open arms.