Last 2 versions of monkey

I'd muted my phone and used one of my co-worker's phones to let my wife know that all bets were off and that she'd need to forget about feeding me tonight. She wasn't all that happy.

We also had a bumper crop of idiots on the call who didn't have a clue but were there because they "were needed". I only managed the OS on these Unix servers and it didn't seem like an operating system issue, which made it very much not my problem.

So I listened to the developers as they discussed the various application transitions and how the browser was supposed to connect through to another system. This didn't sound right.

And that's when one of the directors, from the executive level, walked into my shared office. It was after 7PM local time, so she must've been anxious over this problem. She asked me how it was going.

And then it hit me. Like a bolt of lightning. I'd been listening to these people meandering and all of the little hints I'd gotten via my use of Lynx to trace activity made sense.

I punched the mute off, ssh'd into the offending system and opened the file I'd previously perused and changed an IP address to the OTHER connection for a web server, saved the change, all the while explaining what I was doing.

"It's a workaround for now. It'll allow the team to run their tests over the week-end but we'll need to resolve the problem next week... OK, I've saved the file, so, try your web login to the system again."

I sat there, relaxing, after having been so tense for so long, my director watching me.

I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and took the call, getting my wife to swap seats with me so I wouldn't be at the wheel. In the first 15 seconds I knew this was going to be a sucky call. We'd left early on a Friday so now I was going to pay for it. | Sadly, like an idiot, I allowed myself to be conferenced in. | Stupid, stupid, *STUPID*. I should've had my phone drop the call "accidentally". (I prayed for us to enter a dead zone but the local cellular company had done a wonderful job of covering this route. Rats.) | Then I opened my mouth to make a suggestion. | It's been said that no good deed goes unpunished. I seemed to remember that it was one of Star Trek's Ferenghi "Rules of Acquisition", too, and I was living it. And my wife was not pleased. | Dinner in Greensboro (fast food) and we shut down for the night between there and Roanoke. | Stupid me forgot the fucking pager. | The kids (8 and 6) were sound asleep and Helen and I were in the process of "getting it together" when the pager went off. | I'd set the tone to one of the "pleasing" sounds. At that time, it wasn't a "pleasing" sound. Our older daughter moved and was waking up, so I had to pull out, roll over, find my underwear, and get up to turn the damned thing off. | Oh, shit, it's almost midnight, and the pager told me about a conference call toll-free number and activation code. Damn. | "Helen, I'm going to do this in the lobby downstairs, I want the kids to be able to sleep".

Pulling on pants and my used shirt, I grabbed my laptop bag and went down to the lobby, a nice quiet place. | The fellow on duty looked at me funny.

"Is there any convenient phone I can dial a toll-free number on? I just got paged." | He nodded and unlocked the little "guest office" for me to use. | I dialed in and found it to be even more hellish than ever. This hotel had a broadband connection so I brought out the laptop, booted it up, and connected to the intranet via the VPN network client. I also started to download my mailbox as the call continued. I was thankful that the call ended at 12:37 and it was just a matter that a software installer wanted people immediately available should a problem arise. I merely lurked on the call since the intaller was able to finish the job from the documentation. | I packed up again (my mail was, as usual, as dull as ditchwater) and headed back for the room, thanking the desk clerk. I managed to get in quietly and went to cuddle with Helen and found her fully dressed. Oh shit. | "It's about time you got back. What was it this time?"

"The standard bullshit, related to the call that I was on this afternoon. The installer wanted people around to hold his hand. Fucking idiot. Sally had reported so many defects in the documentation that he had good information in front of him." | "I don't like these calls all the time, dear. You're on vacation for a week before you go back to class. What will we do?" | I sighed. I already knew what was needed, and had done the first good deed. The pager's battery had been removed, and I'd turned off my cell-phone. | With my opportunity for wife's physical attention at and end I faded into a fitful sleep. | In the morning I had to drain myself in the shower; Helen was having nothing to do with me. I didn't understand and said so. | "You could've turned off the beeper last night, you know. So I'm not fooling around until we've been home for a while and you're on a reasonable schedule." | And last night's was the first shot in three months. To say I was more than a little bit honked off didn't go very far. The classified ads up in New York were going to be pored over by me in an effort to get out. | With both my pager and cell-phone turned off we continued our drive up through the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia along I-81 (which wasn't that great a penalty from I-95 in miles or time since the traffic was far less frenetic) and had an early lunch at a nice Elvis-themed diner near Natural Bridge before we pulled off at Luray to visit the caverns. While our progress wasn't very fast, we weren't pressing too hard either. We'd taken our time and didn't even get to the Maryland line before we pulled off for the night. | | | | |

And I'd jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

Never show genius in your work, even in a fit of irritation.

All of a sudden, you get dragged into these awful calls on a consistent basis. You've become indispensable. It's worse when you're the problem solver in at least one third of the calls.

So my wife saw less of me. I was also eating less, despite raiding the vending machines.

I learned to hate IM's that read "u there?". If it hadn't been policy, I'd've kept the Sometimes Connects tool from ever starting again.

I'm a techie, not a conference call person. I don't care how nice the headset might be, I don't care about the nice little "attaboys" I was collecting, I preferred to be a sysadmin in an understaffed group, so I was accumulating a backlog of my *real* work.

My office mate was a workaholic woman who'd been through more divorces (for her age) than seemed humanly possible. Type A, all the way. We might not have seen eye-to-eye on too many things (she was a tester, not a sysadmin) but she was a full metal bitch, which, for me, was reassuring. I'd grown up with a sarcastic mother so I was far more comfortable with someone who wouldn't waste her breath on saying something pleasant unless she really, really meant it. So she got to see me going crazy with these calls. Sally had a tendency to use language (whenever we could close the door) that wasn't considered "politically correct" though it was often pungent and tactically correct. We also got along well enough that we were able to tease each other, if only a little.

There were some advantages to not eating lunch, too. I was one of the few people who wasn't laid low by the Taco Salad from the lunch counter in the atrium. Being on three of these hell-spawned calls that day meant I didn't get any of my own work done. At least I made sure to get charge codes from them for my time.

Sally and I ended up on some of the same calls. I did try to punish her by slipping a note with the solution on it to her, just to make myself look less important but she screwed that plan up by crediting me. Even when I was waving for her not to.

*SIGH*

It wasn't yet time for me to panic but I had vacation time coming up; We were going drive up north to see my folks on Long Island and I'd take a class company class in the city. My wife would use that time to visit her family in Connecticut and then spend another week lounging and slowly driving back to Florida. A wonderful plan. A brilliant plan. A perfect plan.

Clausewitz once said "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy". It's been said that Patton's Law is actually corrollary to Clausewitz, since he said "A good plan, executed today, will beat a perfect plan executed tomorrow".

I'd already learned that no budget survives contact with expenses. I finally generalized it to "No plan ever survives contact with reality". And my vacation plan met reality and got changed.

Very few people had my cell-phone number. Too many people had my beeper number, and the beeper was way too advanced for me to just ignore. Idiot, idiot, idiot me.

We'd actually gotten pretty far when the first call came in. Charlotte was just behind us and we were headed towards Greensboro when my cell phone started to complain. Shit.

I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and took the call, getting my wife to swap seats with me so I wouldn't be at the wheel. In the first 15 seconds I knew this was going to be a sucky call. We'd left early on a Friday so now I was going to pay for it.

Sadly, like an idiot, I allowed myself to be conferenced in.

Stupid, stupid, *STUPID*. I should've had my phone drop the call "accidentally". (I prayed for us to enter a dead zone but the local cellular company had done a wonderful job of covering this route. Rats.)

Then I opened my mouth to make a suggestion.

It's been said that no good deed goes unpunished. I seemed to remember that it was one of Star Trek's Ferenghi "Rules of Acquisition", too, and I was living it. And my wife was not pleased.

Dinner in Greensboro (fast food) and we shut down for the night between there and Roanoke.

Stupid me forgot the fucking pager.

The kids (8 and 6) were sound asleep and Helen and I were in the process of "getting it together" when the pager went off.

I'd set the tone to one of the "pleasing" sounds. At that time, it wasn't a "pleasing" sound. Our older daughter moved and was waking up, so I had to pull out, roll over, find my underwear, and get up to turn the damned thing off.

Oh, shit, it's almost midnight, and the pager told me about a conference call toll-free number and activation code. Damn.

"Helen, I'm going to do this in the lobby downstairs, I want the kids to be able to sleep".

Pulling on pants and my used shirt, I grabbed my laptop bag and went down to the lobby, a nice quiet place.

The fellow on duty looked at me funny.

"Is there any convenient phone I can dial a toll-free number on? I just got paged."

He nodded and unlocked the little "guest office" for me to use.

I dialed in and found it to be even more hellish than ever. This hotel had a broadband connection so I brought out the laptop, booted it up, and connected to the intranet via the VPN network client. I also started to download my mailbox as the call continued. I was thankful that the call ended at 12:37 and it was just a matter that a software installer wanted people immediately available should a problem arise. I merely lurked on the call since the intaller was able to finish the job from the documentation.

I packed up again (my mail was, as usual, as dull as ditchwater) and headed back for the room, thanking the desk clerk. I managed to get in quietly and went to cuddle with Helen and found her fully dressed. Oh shit.

"It's about time you got back. What was it this time?"

"The standard bullshit, related to the call that I was on this afternoon. The installer wanted people around to hold his hand. Fucking idiot. Sally had reported so many defects in the documentation that he had good information in front of him."

"I don't like these calls all the time, dear. You're on vacation for a week before you go back to class. What will we do?"

I sighed. I already knew what was needed, and had done the first good deed. The pager's battery had been removed, and I'd turned off my cell-phone.

With my opportunity for wife's physical attention at and end I faded into a fitful sleep.

In the morning I had to drain myself in the shower; Helen was having nothing to do with me. I didn't understand and said so.

"You could've turned off the beeper last night, you know. So I'm not fooling around until we've been home for a while and you're on a reasonable schedule."

And last night's was the first shot in three months. To say I was more than a little bit honked off didn't go very far. The classified ads up in New York were going to be pored over by me in an effort to get out.

With both my pager and cell-phone turned off we continued our drive up through the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia along I-81 (which wasn't that great a penalty from I-95 in miles or time since the traffic was far less frenetic) and had an early lunch at a nice Elvis-themed diner near Natural Bridge before we pulled off at Luray to visit the caverns. While our progress wasn't very fast, we weren't pressing too hard either. We'd taken our time and didn't even get to the Maryland line before we pulled off for the night.