It’s 11:00 on a Friday night. Ordinarily I’d be parked in front of the television, or perhaps playing a bit of Diablo II with The Missus.

Not tonight, though. I’m at the office, watching large audio files transfer from one server to another, one at a time, one after another, one by one.

The current estimate is that this process will be completed early on Sunday morning. What am I doing here, then? Babysitting. I simply cannot get any rest until I’m reasonably confident that the file transfer won’t go horribly wrong during the first few hours. This is just a part of how seriously I take my job.

Wendi’s due to pick me up as soon as she wakes tomorrow morning, which will probably mean I leave at 9:00. Don’t worry about me… I have my internet and my music to keep me going. Life’s really not that bad.

I apologize for being moderately incoherent. It’s been a long day. Oh yes, and that new version of Qualitap won’t land until early next week, right about the time I’m on that department-heads retreat. Mwahahaha.

So I was at work for a number of hours yesterday, and one of the tasks involved upgrading a program called Qualitap to version 9.0. Hurray, it went swimmingly… or did it?

Thanks to the travails of hardworking salesfolks, we now know that Arbitron sent us the wrong damned version of Qualitap. Now I’ve downloaded the right damned version, and get to camp out here at the office tonight in an attempt to mitigate the damage and create a working Tapscan/Qualitap environment.

So much for parking myself in front of the DVD deck at home with my laptop and typing up a couple of TMTT scripts. Grr.

Update, 9:00pm PDT: No, the version I was told to download is still not the right version. Details here. I’m going home now so I can prepare to do this again tomorrow night. Bah.

Most days I love my job. I get paid a decent salary, I have great job security, most days I don’t have to work long or hard hours, I make most of the decisions about how I’m going to implement technology, and I have a lot of neat toys to play with.

There are days like today, however, that put my love to the test. The server-room printer is out for repair. The Rosey VoxPro Mac refuses to boot from the Norton Utilities CD… any CD, in fact. The T-1 line that feeds this website as well as the main corporate site went down twice today. I’m still waiting to hear back from CTL’s tech support about the useless hunk of junk we bought from them a couple of weeks ago. Best of all, one of our sales managers watched his PC die this morning. The error message given upon boot is only mildly cryptic, but I’ll spare you the message and give you the loose translation: “Your copy of Windows ™ has gone to meet its Maker. Burn a small animal at the Altar of Bill, say three Hail Microsofts and reinstall the operating system all over again from scratch. You worm.”

I’ve faced this before, so I gathered the remains of the PC and took it to my lair. After throwing the last of my small animals on the altar I attempted to revive the patient. Things looked promising until I made the foolish mistake of installing the drivers for the sound card. Immediately the computer froze solid. “Okay,” I said to myself… and I can often be heard talking to myself… “Maybe the sound card is what frazzled the PC. Let’s get out a totally different sound card and try installing it.” Surprise of surprises, the computer froze in exactly the same way just after I completed installing the drivers for the new card. So, as long as there’s no working sound card drivers in the machine it works great.

As of this writing I have given up on that chassis and am instead “refurbing” one of the Dell boxen we bought a year ago. They’re wonderful machines, though they seem to carry some sort of curse… whosoever gains the use of one of these GX1s is fated soon to leave the company. If you have a better explanation of why I’ve had to transfer one of these five computers to new users almost 20 times in the past year, I’d like to hear it.

Hmm. “Here you go, Name Withheld! Enjoy! Mwahahahahaha….”

(ps – I’m not that evil. Really. And in case one of my coworkers reads this, please understand that I hold everyone in the company in the highest regard, except for those that I don’t. My opinions are my own, blah blah blah.)

The time has come. (Insert “Rocky Horror” audience line here.) With an 18 gigabyte drive devoted solely to storing email, you’d think that a couple hundred Groupwise accounts could live comfortably, right?

Wrong.

No matter what or how I tell them, these people never… ever… delete anything. Ever. So today I take a drastic step: a purge of all email older than the first of this year. This time I received permission from the General Manager, so if anyone complains I can shrug my shoulders and say “Jack told me to.” It’s nice to have the bigwigs on your side for a change, wouldn’t you agree?

This process is likely to take all day, if not part of tomorrow. Good thing I didn’t have anything exciting planned.

I woke up a bit earlier than usual today, got out the door earlier than usual, and as I was getting off the bus on the way to work my pager went off.

The Quantum Snap! Server crashed, hard. This means no network storage for the entire building. As I write this, it’s still rebuilding its RAID array, after which I’ll let people back onto the system. A helpful technician at Quantum walked me through gathering a few reports that I then emailed for analysis; hopefully I’ll get back from them some sort of procedure by which I can prevent this from happening again.

Not, mind you, that I’m holding my breath. Computers are evil. If you’ve been at this for as long as I have and don’t yet know this, you need to get into another line of work.