Hell Day

Work was stupendously bad today. What made it worse was that the whole day things seemed to be going pretty well. I stupidly miscalculated the time difference between London and here and called Mindy when it was 6am there instead of the 9am I thought that it was. But it was ok! She'd been awake since 3am.. poor little one. Still it was good to talk with her and find out about her day. While we chatted I read a bit of her blog and left a comment. I was pretty amused by her enthusiasm about the shopping and wish I'd been there to see it in person. Other things that went well were, an urgent task I was working on got semi-cancelled, another one got postponed a day and all that stood in the way of me and the 6-a-side soccer comp kick off (followed by the second half of the Sydney FC vs Persik Kerdiri ACL match) was a measly little IPO change that had passed through dev, test and staging environments with barely a noise... until production.

In production, things aren't like they are in UAT and Test, where they get fairly regularly updated and poked and prodded by developers doing their work. Production is like a sacred shrine.. or a dusty unlived in house. Very liable to break with a careless step. Mostly it's ok, but in this case.. it was not ok.

Everything broke. One problem fixed led to two more things breaking. As we went things just weren't going our way.

One slightly comical break in the catastrophe was when i got a phone call from Eugene. When i picked up all I could hear was "EEEAAAOOOOWWW EEEAAAOOOOWWW EEEAAAOOOWWW" Haha I had set the alarm when I left that morning and he'd obviously gotten used to it being off, since usually I or Gareth had arrived home before him lately. After I reminded him of the code, he laughed, cursed me and said that from now on he was going to set the alarm every day until i got caught out like he had.

At around 6:30 pm we decided to pull the plug and back track. Easy? Usually yes... tonight? No. So, at quarter to 8 on Wednesday night I trudged home having achieved a sum total of nothing.
Massive cleanup job ahead of me tomorrow, as well as explaining what went wrong to a little table full of business and management types, probably. Ugh. And the semi-cancelled and postponed jobs are both on tomorrow night as well. Triple ugh. At least I don't have to worry about rushing off somewhere tomorrow night... i can spend the whole night at work if i have to...