In the interim between the journal entries, I have done nothing but work.

Let's spell it out.

Eight twenty AM yesterday: Journaling.
Eight twenty AM today: Journaling.

Between those two entries: Work.

No kidding. Yesterday, minus an hour for lunch, was a sixteen hour day. And today, without setting a foot in the office, I’ve already worked two hours. Or at least, I’m logging an additional 2 hours into my status report and hour logging.

Not that what I’m doing is particularly hard. It’s not. The most difficult part of it is trying to stay professional, positive, and upbeat. You have to try to silence the voices inside that are shouting please, please GOD I need to get off of this conference call! I’m not even doing anything useful! And I’m hungry and I’m tired and I’m bored and slightly horny – you've got to let the madness stop.

So you silence it all for a while, pushing it down, suppressing, reminding yourself that problems like this do happen from time to time. (We are having a major outage on one of the financial applications.) I also try to use, as ammunition against my inner complaint artist, the idea that my compensation is sufficient to justify this kind of work-until-you-drop cycle, at least occasionally. Also, your co-workers were put through the wringer last week. Now it's your turn.

But every time I shut that voice up, the complaint voice, about ten minutes later it comes back. It wants a break from this. It wants to check sports scores or play a video game or jerk off and take a nap. Hey I'm twenty seven what do you want from me, my dick isn't dead, even if everyone at this job wants to pretend that we are dickless workaholic automatons.

It gets to the point where it’s difficult for me to think about the problem at hand or troubleshoot. At the thirty six hour mark, my internals are solidly black – pure negative signal. I listen to these higher-ups on the phone debate about what the real problem is and I just start to sort of glaze over. My eyes frost. My ears rotate laterally to reduce the wave surface area. The volume goes down and then I’m in a different place, just thinking to myself that I want to get away from all of this, that it’s time to go, that there’s nothing I can do about the problem anyway, it's not really something I can solve.

Three days back. Three fucking days and on the third I have the most stressful, challenging day of my career. It’s so difficult, man. I feel like running away from it all, throwing in the towel, and announcing that I can’t do this. That I won’t do this any more. Obviously I won’t do that but my inner child wants to protest and will not be silenced.

I got three separate snatches of sleep: between 1Am and 3:30 Am – Christ was it hard to wake up at this point… – then again between 4:30 AM and 6:00 AM. Neil called and I gave him the status of the 4AM call with appserver technical support at BEA Systems, not to be confused with BAE Systems, the consulting company. Then again between 6:10 AM and about eight AM. So I did manage to get a little sleep. I should be able to make it through the day. Maybe.

One of the worst pieces of last night was when Neil says, on the conference call, Yes, Joe will be having a conversation with BEA at 4AM to facilitate a live handoff of the ticket to the next engineer. I could actually feel something die in me. Because at that point it was already 11PM or so and all I wanted to do was to go home, have another bite to eat and maybe a beer, and then sleep through until this morning. Dreams: Dashed.

Last night, at 5:30 PM, when we were alerted to this problem, it came in through email. Leonardo something reported “intermittent client problems in production” and submitted a stack trace.

I was in Pete’s office at the time and he looks at me and says This is how it starts. I nod agreement, and say that I’ll pick it up, and don’t worry about it – go home. I didn’t even take it seriously at the time. I thought – oh, this problem won’t be too bad. I made a list of things to ask Leonardo, called him, and started work tracing and evaluating, like a good little software infrastructure support lead.

Next thing I know it’s 6:30 and I’m on a bridge with Neil, John, Subbiah, and Bruce. And it just doesn’t end.

Anyhow I think I’m going to make some sandwiches and head into work. There’s nothing much else to say, you know. I’m tired. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through Saturday. I hope this problem is resolved. I’m sick of working with stupid BEA support engineers. If I’m asked to stay up all night again for live handoffs I will put a bullet in my head. It's a good thing I don't own a gun. Maybe I should, explicitly for this purpose.

Some other goals:
- Work out at some point. I need to get my weights in. I won’t allow this fucking job to disrupt my workouts. I won’t let it kill my health and disrupt things that are this important to me. wont wont wont wont
- Update my hours and status based on yesterday’s work.
- Do the needful for the FIPMT team (ha, that is Neil's awkward phrase for "Get this thing done no matter what and don't bitch about it," isn't it fun to work for a multinational company where one can learn new linguistic butcheries that you would have never otherwise encountered)

-At least LOOK at the disaster recovery planning doc, you need to make sure you're prepared for the 3PM meeting, no matter where we are with this BEA support issue.

Signing off, with fatigue written on my face and a death metal song in my heart, in this case hammer smashed face by Cannibal Corpse, specifically the lyrics

Something inside of me
is coming out
i feel like killing
yooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Which I would like to shout directly into Neil's stupid face.

Love and kisses,

Toby