w i n t e r
listening for a call
Listening for a call.
Job failed last night. No new data warehouse. Blows my whole day, so now I'm watching a server kicking off people I told to stay off anyway.
Connected users 5, no wait 6, not authorized...disconnect. Are you sure? Yeah, or I wouldn't have mashed the little button saying "disconnect".
1, 2 off. Down to 3, all mine.
Let's hope it stays that way.
Damn machines. I've figured out time wise how much work I've got to do today 33.6 hours worth. You add it up. There ain't enough hours in the day and now it's 11:00 and I have not started yet. Can't start, no build. The one day of the year when I needed the build, had to have the freakin build.
With two others helping we still can't get it done before the new at midnight, not if we don't get started real soon and have no more screw ups.
I knew I should have hung around Cullen's last night. Should have gone out for drinks or played asshole until I was falling over sloppy and then just slept today.
Why the hell did I bother to go home and read, go to bed early and sleep while this build was supposed to be whirring away seventy miles east? Why?
Waiting for this call is like waiting for Godot.
Miles and miles of wire make up the connection that ties me to that machine, to the phone, to the rest of the campus, to the failed mainframe, and it may as well all be piled into the back seat of a lime green Gremlin and pushed over the nearest overpass for all the good it's doing me now.
In its silence it tells me all I need to know.
In two wasted hours I could've pulled the head on the MG. I could have adjusted the valves and the carbs...twice. I could have changed a water pump, or the slave cylinder on a certain BMW I've taken to working on. I could've flown to D.C. and been almost to the Capital tunnel system to meet Beck for lunch. Surprise, the damn machines broke today so here I am!
I could have finished my book. Glazed a couple windows. Done laundry.
Instead I wait for a call. A call that never comes.
And I realize how much time I spend waiting on these damn machines to do what they're supposed to do.
"Hal, you're falling down on the job again..."
Reminds me of a Vonnegut story, about a computer who helps a guy win the love of a woman he can't possibly woo. He wins her heart by giving her poetry written by the computer and he must keep writing and handing over poems as long as they're together. The computer meanwhile figures out emotion (sort of) and crashes for good, but not before writing enough poetry to keep the guy with the gal for a couple hundred years.
Good story.
Maybe I'll go write a poem...or a letter.
goodnight 12.1.99