I was tired by nine o’clock last night. Very tired. I almost went to bed… but then it hit me: I needed to listen to music. These cravings come to me less often now than in years past, but they’re no less powerful when they do. So, on went the headphones.

(I’m guessing that my mind needed settling after spending a couple of hours visiting the rugrats. Yeah, this separation thing is hitting me a lot harder than I thought it would. Ugh.)

I finally rolled into bed around midnight-thirty and conked out.

My phone woke me up sometime shortly after two in the morning. There was a major network problem that required my presence at the office. So, dressed and out the door I went, can of root beer in hand to give me a sugar boost. Turns out the central 39-port ethernet switch that runs the office network had gone on the fritz. Power-cycling it did the trick, and I was back home and in bed by four AM. It took me a bit longer to get back to sleep, of course.

The alarm went off at seven-thirty like normal… and I finally got up to turn off the alarm when, a few minutes later, it chimed again. Nope, I certainly wasn’t getting up right then.

My phone woke me up, yet again, at nine-thirty. Turns out the Welchia.D worm was running rampant within the company network, and one of the high mucky-mucks had set a two o’clock deadline for having it eradicated.

Oh, that’s two o’clock east coast time. So there I was, with an hour and a half to complete a high-profile job, still completely naked and unshowered. Whee! And they were sending a car to retrieve me ASAP!

Into the shower I went, post haste. I threw on some clothes, grabbed my jacket and phone, but forgot my umbrella until after I was halfway to work. Whoops. Have you seen the weather out there today?

Thanks to the power of Novell’s ZENworks, I was able to “push” the Welchia removal tool to almost all of the PCs in the building. Getting it to run involved a bit of social engineering, but when you have the weight of the general managers on your side it’s not nearly as difficult as usual to get the rank-and-file to do your bidding. (Bwahahaha. Ahem.)

The damned worm turned up on three computers, which is two more infected machines than I thought we’d find. Argh. Once I was comfortable with the reduced stress levels, I took off for lunch.

Because, dammit, that much stress and having my sleep schedule totally screwed up and still dealing with personal emotional crap, all on an empty stomach? Faugh!

Near as I can tell, though, life has returned to whatever passes for normal in our office building. Maybe tomorrow I can get some real work done.

Yeah, I doubt it too.