The morning after the night before

Well, we did it. The data has safely left out hands (for the moment) and is currently somebody else’s problem.

For a few hours, anyway.

Last night, I “slept” exactly the same way a fireman would “sleep” in a halfway house for unrepentant pyromaniacs. I had not exactly forgotten but perhaps neglected to fully grok the implications of the following facts:

1. My husband also works for MegaBank
b. and is in the same department,
iii. and is furthermore a developer.

My responsibilities as an analyst are pretty much limited to checking results, which means that I’m one of the people with long gaps between frantic activities. I was done with my part by 11:00 last night, and not expected to log back in to check things until 2:00 a.m. 3:00 a.m. 4:00 a.m., when the load would definitely should probably could possibly be finished.

Himself, on the other hand, was the guy to call if things simply stopped working altogether. He is the master of the server that automates the testing. It would not be acceptable for him to sort of sleep through an alert, because it would mean that the whole entire mess would grind to an unseemly halt and then bad things would happen and, who knows, the entire global banking system might grind to a halt because he has Super Sleeping Powers.

Which he totally does. I got up at 3:30 this morning so I could start watching for The Email. I turned on my desk light. I was typing on the keyboard, softly at first but then as I realized that honestly I could have been installing new tile in there and he wouldn’t have noticed, I went ahead and started whacking away like I usually do, 100 words a minute right on the tips of my fingernails.

To which he went, “…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

Then I flipped on the main light, because my desk light was giving me a headache.

“…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

And then it was 5:30 and his cell phone was having seizures and nearly vibrating off the side table, so I started going, “TIM! GET UP! YOU’VE GOT MAIL! DUDE! WAKE…UP!!!!!!”

“…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

Honestly. Where can I get some of those Super Sleeping Powers? Because all night long, his Blackberry was going, “Duh-dun-dun-duh, brrrrring!!!” to announce that yet another email had been received. Combined with my laptop sitting quietly in the corner going, “:bing-bong!:” every time I got a new email (because one of them would ostensibly be my team’s developer telling me that the data was loaded and to please start chucking numbers around like a crazy person), well.

Yeah.

I doubt I got two hours of contiguous sleep last night.

But after our last “checking in” meeting at 9:00 this morning, things got almost relaxing. I cleaned out my corporate inbox, which had gotten backed up with almost two hundred messages over the last 48 hours. Tidied up my code, putting in those comments about what is where and why that I know I’ll appreciate in a few months when somebody asks me to run this thing again. Did a little more in-depth analysis on our results, isolating the things that made me go, “hmmm…” but not “OHMYGAH, STOP THE PRESSES, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!”

Got some breakfast. Made more coffee. Took some cold medicine. Argued with the cat about who actually owns the alpaca shawl.

She won.



Temporarily.

Eventually, she’ll need to use the litter box or something and then bwahahahahaha, it will be mine once more.

And now, I’m breaking off for “lunch,” by which I mean “cleaning up my bedroom, which looks like the unrepentant pyromaniacs invited their rabid rioter friends over for a party.”

Because that’s my life, people: One never-ending rollercoaster of constant excitement…