Thursday, April 08, 2004

God Damnit I could be drawing or sleeping now !

I am still at work. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT ?!!
I was stupid enough to reply 'yes' when they asked me to volunteer a few hours of overtime to help test a roll-out of a newer version of my department's CMS product. After all, I know it best of the entire department - at least best from a user's point of view. I won't pretend to be able to understand the infrastructure or how the databases tie together, but I know how the software behaves, what the issues are that to date are unsolved, which workarounds there are, in other words: if this was a horse, I wouldn't be a vet, but a damn good instructor and riding champion.
So yeah, if you want someone there to tell a bunch of infrastructure experts wether or not the software's doing what it normally should do, after the upgrade, I'd be a logical pick.

Except it's some 6 hours after they started installation, and it's still not even properly installed. I'm sitting around at work, reading about the history of webcomics, online, in lack of ANYTHING ELSE TO DO.
I don't mind the overtime in a sense that I'll compensate it all sometime next week, but damnit, it's practically MIDNIGHT and I'm in AMSTERDAM ! I could be in sweet Tilburg, curling up in bed with my cats Satan and Damien, or watching a good movie on DVD, or working on The Grim DotCom, or just chatting away on ICQ, or chillin' on the downstairs couch talking with Viktor. Hell, I could be drinking in the Cul de Sac.
Instead I'm sitting here on stand-by while they try to get the program running. I barely slept this week, so I'm exhausted now and can barely keep my eyes open. And since I won't be able to catch any train or bus home anymore, I guess a taxi will drive me home after this - luckily, I *do* work for a company that'll pay for that. So a taxi *WILL* drive me home. Still, I'd rather already have BEEN home. And the train has the added benefit that I've mastered how to draw during the ride. I doubt I'd get much drawing done in a cab, during some, what, three hours ? on the road home, in the dark. Yeah. No comics tonight, folks. Thank my wonderful employer for that.

Anyway, I'll stop bitching. It wouldn't all be so damn bad if I wasn't sitting around being practically useless. It's all infrastructure that's causing the trouble now, nothing that my expertise can help. I'll only get useful once they get it to work. And from the looks of it, that'll be damn late, and MUCH testing won't end up being done. They could have just asked one of our NY clients to test, instead. It'd be about the end of the working day for them, there. That wouldn't be as bad as my predicament.

Damnit. I hate Amsterdam. It's my weekend by now. To quote Clerks' Dante: I'm not even supposed to be here !

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