wiped-out

My Ex is supposed to be able to go home tomorrow (which is Wednesday, cause I've not slept yet). I took the kids to see here after they got out of school and that did a lot of good for them and their mom, which was very needed and very helpful.

I went into work tonight for previously scheduled downtime and that went well. Except about an hour after we were done, one of the linux boxes mysteriously rebooted. That happened just after 11pm. I ended-up spending almost 3 hours getting the thing up, stable, and the SAN partitions fsck'd and mounted. Dealing with people logging in as soon as the the box was pingable didn't exactly help, and when I do go back to work I am going to basically give my boss the ultimatum that we either get some Service Level Agreements in place for these system and particulary for roles, responsibilities, and accountablity with the developers, or he can have my notice and I'll go back to contracting.

Yes, I am that tired of the games, the politics, the childishness, and the dishonesty. I so just want to pack-up my stuff and go away right now. At least as a contractor I don't have to pretend that I, or anyone else, has any real interest in the bottom-line, in long-term risk management, in co-operative collaboration, or anything else other than getting the current task at hand finished on time and under budget.

a more sane update

My Ex is still in the hospital. She's now supposed to come home tomorrow. She had a heart attack. It was due in part to her being a pack-a-day smoker since she was in her teens, to having somewhat high cholesterol, and to lack of exercise since the house fire because her asthma had gone into over-drive. She had a partially blocked artery that caught a clot. The doctor was able to remove the clot and then do angioplasty to clear the artery. Then they put in a stent to keep it open. The clot was most likely due to her using an epinephrine inhaler 2-3 times a day nearly every day for the last four years as blood clots are one of the side-effects from regular long-term use.

She's lucky the clot went to her heart; if it went to her brain, she'd most likely be in a box by now. You know you are having a bad day with the silver lining to the black cloud of doom is having a heart attack.

She's had a life-long alergy to asprin, which doesn't play well with having been given a stent. So tomorrow the doctors are going to try to desensitize her asprin allergy. They start with a .01 milligram of asprin and do a skin test like they would for any other potential allergen, giving her benadryl along with it. Then over the course of the next three hours they increase the dosage every 15 minutes until they get to the desired level or she has an allergic reaction to it. If successful, this will greatly reduce the risk of clotting around the stent.

Things are better with work. I'm still amazed at the change of perspective even just 5 hours of sleep can bring. Having one of last night's participants e-mail an unsolicited apology also helped; knowing that some results were not intended, let alone maliciously so, is a big stress releiver. I'm still going to talk to my boss, because the disorganization within our own department is well past the point of being detrimental to the work effort, and we still need a basic SLA if we can't get ones for individual systems.

I'm still looking for a new job, but not with the "at any cost" mindset.