Sure, they announced late this morning that we’d be closing shop at 2pm. They needn’t have bothered, really, ‘cause there’s almost nobody here. Going into a three day weekend, arguably the biggest one of the year, is it any surprise that half of the people already have the day off as vacation, another quarter of them are simply playing hooky, and most of the rest are bailing whenever they feel like it?

Mind you, I’m not complaining one bit. I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. I get to listen to music at whatever volume I like, for instance. Nevermind all the webcomics I’m catching up on.

This isn’t to say I’ve accomplished nothing today. I solved a moderately strange email problem for one of our jobshare sales teams, upgraded software at the front desk, and… er, rotated backup tapes. Okay, so that’s all I’ve done today. Your point?

Next week promises to be delightfully dull. Bring it on!

Once again, Backup Exec is biting me in the ass, figuratively speaking. My main fileserver is running under an abend condition caused by the “agent” software that allows me to get comprehensive backups from that server. During my attempt to upgrade the agent I ran into an annoying problem: The installer insisted that I close the agent software before doing the upgrade, but I’d already done so. I even called the “stop” procedure again just to be sure. No such luck. The same problem came up when I tried to upgrade the email server’s agent, so it’s not just a fluke thing with one machine.

So let’s see… right now I can’t reliably run a backup on either server until I can reboot them both and install the new software. When will that be happening? Not during business hours, I can assure you. This means I get to come back later tonight and go through this whole install procedure again.

It’s not quite how I wanted to spend the night before my personal holiday off, but I’m not always given much say in the matter, am I?

I experienced something unusual this afternoon: During the off-site department heads’ shindig, I received heartfelt compliments from a couple of important personages I work with/for. The gist is that my efforts to improve the quality of my communication and interpersonal skills over the last couple of years hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Wow. I didn’t even think I was doing that good of a job at it, really. Apparently a few of my coworkers do. Suddenly I feel a lot better about my job performance; much of the impression I leave on people involves the professional attitude with which I do my job rather than the technical skills I bring to bear, after all. That’s just a fact of human nature. It’s immensely gratifying (and reassuring) to know that I’m making noticeable improvement.

There’s hope for me yet, perhaps.