Skip this entry..it’s a miserable dirge of a blog…

After another shit night’s sleep and a massive amount of stress about work. I dragged myself, through the greyest of grey winter mornings, into the office, early, to do some urgently needed systems work [switching the main external web server from an old Ultra 1 to a scarily desirable V20z dual Opteron – Phwooaar]. I knew it was going to be problematic…these things always are, and this has so many dependencies that something major was bound to go wrong.
But it didn’t. In fact it went really quite well and afforded me time to explain to John, my project colleague, why I was behind on the current deadline. He was extremely good about it and made me feel marginally better about the state of things.
Just then, something bad happened. Bad in the sense of the worst possible systems catastrophe I could imagine. My room 101 of technical nightmares. As it turns out, this is the worst technical problem I have ever been involved with, in any job, ever. For the geeks: Our RAID5 array which was, ironically, purchased to provide redundancy, had three concurrent disk failures. This means that the two systems using it, that are also the core of all of the IS Infrastructure, were totally fucked. No option for recovery except….backup tapes. Experienced geeks will be crying in sympathy. Thank you. So after many hours of extreme stress and struggle, we still have no computing service to speak of. Believe it or not, I do have a considerable amount of professional integrity. And, together with my pride and sense of self-worth, it can’t take much more of a bashing I can tell you. Leaving work at 9pm, with everything still busted, another long day of stressful misery ahead and a bank account the colour of a Routemaster did make me think

for gods sake make it stop! I’ve had enough! Please, please, please! There must be more to life than this!

So, if anyone out there has a million quid or two that they really wouldn’t miss, I would be very grateful if you donated it, and you might even save a life. I’ll even draw you a nice thank you picture and write you a lovely song.

P.S. apologies to flurble. You weren’t supposed to see that…well not that soon anyway.