And so, the timeline, as well as I can remember it. Bear with me, it’s been a long few days:

4:30am Saturday — The UPS hiccups, throwing the entire Phase 1 part of the office building into disarray. This includes all of the engineering equipment that drives the radio stations, all of the Enco computers that provide audio material to the radio stations, and all of the fileservers, webservers and other servers under my purview. Including this one.

6:00am Saturday — My phone, which has no volume setting for text messages, beeps at me quietly for the 90-somethingth time, having received a litany of alerts from one particular server (which among other duties serves as my watchdog monitor) that does reliably automatically recover from power failures. (As a general rule I don’t like “AC Power Loss Restart”. When the UPS does burp, it tends to go up and down repeatedly for a minute or so. We’ve lost server power supplies from being rapidly cycled that way.)

7:30am Saturday — I arrive at the station and rush about setting things to rights.

10:30am Saturday — I get home, try to unwind and maybe even get some more sleep than just the three hours I’d claimed so far. But no… the three hours was just enough so that my body didn’t really feel like sleeping during a bright noisy day. Argh.

1:30pm Saturday — The UPS… well, you get the idea. Back to work I go. This time we decide to switch over to straight PGE electricity, bypassing the, er, device. Just in case, you know. Since two failures within a day isn’t the sort of thing that inspires confidence in a piece of equipment.

5:00pm Saturday — Out to dinner. Yay, Chang’s.

10:00pm Saturday — Back at work, this time being the only work visit that was actually planned in advance. See, the workmen were scheduled to fix the U-something-something that night. Previous posting’s events take place. (Argh.)

12:30am Sunday — Service techs report that they need additional parts to heal our ailing heap of batteries, and could they come back Tuesday night? “Sure,” we say, because the longer we stay on PGE power the greater the chance that Something Bad will happen.

1:30am Sunday — Sleep, blessed sleep, before a very nice day spent not doing work stuff.

1:30am Monday — The aforementioned Something Bad happens. PGE dropped the ball, and the building was without power for a bit. Oddly enough, the UPS for the other side of the building did its job perfectly. Go figure.

3:00am Monday — My phone’s beeping? Again? Inconceivable!

4:00am Monday — Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work I go…

And here it is, 9am. I’m not sure when I’m going to get home. I’m probably going to have to work tomorrow. And tomorrow night until close to morning, when the service techs claim they can finally fully fix our fragging fritzed facility. And Wednesday daytime, because the boss is on vacation and there’s no way both he and I can be gone the same day.

But hey… I had a very nice day yesterday. That’s gotta count for something.

Are we having fun, yet?

I suppose I could chalk this up to “things that happen when you’re running on very little sleep or patience and have been at work off and on for over 14 hours.”

But really, it’s just because I’m a moron.

Have you seen those new office chairs that are the fashionable thing in cube farms nowadays? They’re basically just a big rubber ball, sometimes in a container with something resembling back support but some of them are just… big rubber balls.

We have one of those in a cubicle here. It’s been taunting me for months. Tonight I finally broke loose and rolled it down the hall.

Whee!

I rolled it back and forth a bit, and then I did something remarkably stupid, even for me: I kicked it.

Bounce! Bounce bounce! CRASH! tinkle tinkle tinkle…

You know those red lights outside of broadcast studios, the ones that indicate the studio is “on air” and you should be quiet nearby and not open the door except on the direst of emergencies? In our building those fixtures consist of a painted red incandescent bulb inside of a very nice looking, very expensive, very glass enclosure.

And yep, I broke one of them to smithereens.

Did I mention those enclosures are expensive?

So, yeah. On top of already having not one of the best workdays ever, I go and pull a stupid stunt like this. Brilliant, I say. It’s things like this that remind me why I can’t be trusted on my own judgement, unchaperoned…

This didn’t happen to me. Think of this as a hypothetical situation. It isn’t, but I’d really rather you think of it that way anyway. So. Here’s a bit of clue for all the boss-type people out there:

If you’re going to give Underling B the job currently performed by Underling A, hadn’t you jolly well better prepare Underling A in some fashion for this change? So that Underling A doesn’t suddenly find themselves fearing for their employment? And hadn’t you jolly well better not try to keep it a secret from Underling A? Or blow off talking to Underling A until the following week once the secret’s been blown sky-high anyway?

Because, you know, that’s the sort of crap that causes many of your underlings to lose all respect for you. And once that’s gone, what have you got left?

Hmm?

In what alternate reality dimension, not of sight or sound but of mindlessness, is it a good idea to send email attachments of over 200 megabytes?

Seven times?

All at once?

To the utter knob who ruined my morning by crashing the email server with seven 200-plus-megabyte attachments: Go directly to hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

(Before anyone asks: Thanks to the delightful way Groupwise stores messages, I have no way at all of knowing whodunnit. Believe me, that fact alone adds to my blood pressure levels considerably right now.)

Let me make something crystal clear: If you come to me with a request and I think it’s a bad idea, I’m going to say so. If it’s against policy, I’m going to stand by that policy unless there’s a really good reason not to. If it would be a gigantic hassle, I’m going to resist implementing it. If it’s redundant, confusing, or both, I’m going to fight it tooth and nail.

And above all, if you try to play the trump card of “This comes from high up,” I’m just going to dig in my heels even more… because if there’s one thing I despise most it’s the use of office politics to push through stupid ideas that would never otherwise be implemented.

None of this should have to be said. It’s a sad, sad thing indeed that not only does it have to be said, but also that nobody’s listening.

We’re upgrading the voicemail server tonight. And so, I’ve been here for a bit more than twelve hours. I don’t know when we’ll be done. Even better: I need to be here first thing in the morning, no matter when I’m allowed to leave tonight, because of the general state of panic there’ll be among the rest of the staff about how to access voicemail and faxes.

Are we having fun yet? Huh?