Surfacing
On Friday afternoon the lovely girl that sits behind me wandered through the office and remarked “oh, you're not in on Monday, are you”. I had no idea why she was remarking about it, and I had completely forgotten about the booked day off too – to cover for an in-set day at school. I had promised earlier in the afternoon to deploy updates to a far flung client's server farm. I threw the laptop into my bag before cycling home, and thought “I can get it all installed within half an hour anyway”.
My step grandfather had a saying – “you know what thought did”.
And yes... thought shit itself yesterday.
After finally finishing work on my “day off” by about half past ten in the morning, I shouted to the kids, and we walked into town for a promised visit to the new sweet shop, and the big play park.
In reality we didn't leave for an hour.
On the first attempt we got 50 yards along the road, and I remembered that the back door wasn't locked.
On the second attempt I looked at the children's hair, and marched them back to brush their hair.
On the third attempt our youngest remarked that her pants were falling down – closer inspection revealed a pair of pants two or three sizes too big. After waiting an age for her to get changed, she re-appeared wearing tights, and nothing else.
After marching Miss Seven back upstairs to choose clothes for her, I discovered I couldn't get in their bedroom because it was in such a mess you couldn't even walk across the floor.
We finally made it out of the house, to the sweet shop, and on to the park. Just as we arrived my phone vibrated and I glanced at it. Missed calls. Emails. Disaster. Destruction.
I found myself in the horrible position that I shake my head at other parents for – pushing our youngest on a piece of aparatus in the park, while cradling my phone against my ear, talking to a project manager hundreds of miles away.
After getting home an hour or so later, I then spent the entire afternoon connected remotely to a server farm in the middle of nowhere, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Why did something work for me, and the other system admins, but not the users?
Finally early this morning I got to the bottom of the mystery. Now I just need to go and re-claim the “day off”...