gilded leg-irons
Jobs. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em.
This morning I was pondering the fact that I’m a 21st century slave. At least 1.5 out of every 10 hours I work goes to the Government. And this is a comparatively low number by current U.S. standards, because I took the time to relocate to the Free State of New Hampshire, which has neither sales nor income tax, and I currently own no property. I’ve been thinking a lot about buying some property; but then I think it would just be an enormous anchor around my neck, because I’d be forced to work to pay the taxes I’d be charged for daring to enter the ranks of the landed gentry. So I don’t know. I was singing the Grizzly Adams theme song to myself this morning; living in a shack in the woods with bears and crotchety gold-miners for companions definitely has appeal.
It was a typical day in the life of an intrepid software consultant. I had a deadline on testing an interface, and knew I had until 5:00PM to finish it, because my customer’s database was being taken offline for a refresh then. On second glance at the email I received two days ago about the refresh, I noticed it said 5:00PM GMT. Probably an error, I thought, but better safe than sorry, so I checked with my customer. No, actually, it really WAS 5:00PM GMT, meaning I didn’t have until the end of the day to finish the interface, I had an hour. And the programmer working on the interface with me is notoriously slow and incompetent, so it was guaranteed not to work (it didn’t). Good times.
Later in the afternoon, the lead developer on a project I’ve been managing for several months, which will either go live in a blaze of glory, or kill me, within the next ten days, finally figured out why we were getting random error messages in the database instance which approximately 25 people located throughout the U.S. were looking at today via a web conference in preparation for user acceptance testing, which begins Monday morning (that’s morning in EUROPE, I might add). Turns out, the virtual desktop that I and my coworkers have to use to access the customer’s database instances was misconfigured, and everything we thought we were uploading to the QA instance was actually being routed back to, and overwriting, the DEV instance. Now, neither instance is working. Good times.
Meanwhile, I was gleefully informed that I may be sent to work in Taxachusetts for the next 5 months. Not even sure whether to be happy or sad about that, since the alternative is to be sent to Florida for the rest of the year.
We had a company meeting today, so the office was abnormally crowded and I was forced to park far from the building. There was a rain shower late in the afternoon, and the parking lot, which has lousy drainage, turned into a lake. This phenomenon happens so frequently, we actually have a name for the lake. Upon leaving the office, thinking I would outwit Mother Nature and the Nashua Public Works department, I skirted the lake by walking along a grassy bank above a creek that runs by my office in order to get to my car. There’s a wooden fence in between the grassy bank and the parking lot which is about crotch high on me. No worries, I thought, I can straddle that thing. Oh woe… woe!
Was it the fact that I’ve been working 50-hour weeks for a month (not to mention driving from town to town turning in ballot access petitions for the LPNH) and have a sickly whiny cat who hasn’t let me have an unbroken night’s sleep in weeks, leaving me exhausted and brain-dead? The slick grass from the rain? The Lords of Kobol deciding it was time for a pride-crushing smackdown, because I actually had a small smile on my face in anticipation of the weekend ahead (the parts that don’t involve working, I mean)? Who knows. But my second leg didn’t quite make it over the fence, and I wound up face down in the wet parking lot. My palms were bleeding, my best jeans were torn… but all I could think was “Ohgodohgodohgod don’t let my laptop be broken” and “I have to get to the drycleaners before they close to pick up the trousers I need for next week’s business trip”. Such devotion to the money-grubbing cause! I really need to rethink my priorities. :-\
After lumbering to my feet and indulging in a little toddler-esque faux crying (no tears, just noise), I realized I didn’t know where my car keys were. I was quite sure I hadn’t left them on my desk, but they were no longer in my hand, or anywhere in sight. I spent a few minutes circling confusedly, and after checking underneath my car several times, finally noticed that they were indeed under the car; right under the MIDDLE of the car. I already had a mysterious white substance which I have a sneaking suspicion is goose-shit embedded in the flesh of my bleeding palm, and was now faced with the necessity of lying face down on the wet pavement while wearing a cute peach-colored cashmere cardigan for only the second time in order to reach my keys. Necessity being the mother of invention, I broke a branch off a shrub and used it as a primitive tool to drag my keys out without having to actually lie down. Sweater saved! Trousers fetched! Now I just need to plug in my laptop and see if it’s still functional. Seeing as how I’m flying to my client’s office the day after tomorrow, and every bit of information for the project is on it, I’m thinking I may need it.
There has got to be an easier way to pay off college debt…
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