Midweek Doldrums

I've worked in IT on and off for pushing 3 decades.  The first 15 years was usually as a side thought...most of the companies I worked for had only a few desktop PCs, and no need for a full time IT staff.  So, like a lot of us, I made my bones a bit at a time. However, even back then it was always assumed that any work that required a computer to be off line would be done off hours. After finally giving up the day job for full time IT work, this expectation of working nights, weekends and holidays only got more entrenched.

What brought on this train of thought is that for most folks, Wednesday is the halfway point in their week.  For most of us in IT, it's the day that we'd better have whatever we've got to do over the weekend planned out, so that we get as much free time as possible. When you work for a large company, you have all sorts of change management processes that ensure that any and all after hours work is well planned out, with failback plans, and full testing procedures. When it's a smaller company, not so much. Any change management process is, for the most part, self imposed and self regulated.  I try to make sure that I have all of my ducks in a row, but sometimes shit happens.  I was in the office last weekend preparing to upgrade some servers, when I discovered that the test machines I had used to verify the process lacked one piece of hardware that the production servers have...mainly a dedicated card to connect to our storage array. So, back to the drawing board, and another weekend (this one coming up, in fact) where I get to see more of our server room than I might have wished.

The storm that blew through on Monday missed both the clinic and my apartment, but wreaked havoc on a lot of other places here.  The usual housed with trees in the living room, busted windows, and one car that an uprooted tree had pancaked.  I think the best was a house that was pretty much destroyed by a tree falling into it, that had a "for sale - foreclosure" sign in front.  Just hope they'd kept up their homeowners insurance!