Word for today: UGH

I woke up this morning aching. At first, I thought it was “all over,” but it wasn’t – it was “just” my back. Unfortunately, the “back” taking up an awful lot of real estate…it surely did feel like it was “all over.”

Ugh.

And, I had a toothache. Which was no big surprise because a couple weeks ago, I had a tooth split in half. On a biscuit.

I mean, seriously. These things simply don’t happen. And yet, there it is. Although at least I have a reason why such a bizarre thing happened: I had a very old filling that I had been warned was kind of loose and leaky and not doing its job anymore. (At least, they tell me they warned me. Honestly, I don’t really remember anything so urgent being mentioned.)

So it wasn’t just, you know, bite down on a nice, soft, warm biscuit and CRACK!!!

But still. A. Biscuit.

Only me, people…only me…ugh.

And then my plan for the day went completely to hell in a hand basket. UGH!!!

I was going to stop working at 10:00, eat something, clean up a little bit, toodle over and be there promptly at 10:30 (you can see where this is going, right?), and then two hours later (!!), walk out of there with a temporary crown and a couple new fillings and go back to work.

Friends…I never even remembered to send the reminder to my team that I had this dentist appointment today. Or the obligatory ‘work from home’ notice we always send to our immediate team members (at the very least) when we’re not in the office. Because I had an email from my boss that had been sent ‘high priority’ and I opened that before I did anything else and then…well, time kind of did this “whoosh” thing?

Yeah.

At 10:30, I was frantically shoving my arms into my jacket (backwards) while asking if they were quite sure it was still OK because after all, I was going to be a good ten minutes late at this point…and even though I’m pretty sure I kept the hope out of my voice, they made me come in anyway. Dang.

Three…hours…later (ugh!)…I staggered out of there $340 poorer, with half my jaw sore from being open all that time and the other half toasty warm and numb as @*^&@. They’d given me a nice full hit of the anesthetic, he’d touched the drill to the broken tooth and, much to all of our surprise, I’d jumped fifteen feet straight up emitting a shriek like a cougar with its tail in a wood chipper and come down with the distinct impression that by golly, that kinda hurt.

So he hit me with about six barrels more of the stuff, which numbed me to the thighs and also set off a wonderful series of full-body twitches because ephedrine will do that to me. Awesome!

Then I came home and dialed into my next meeting. Late. AGAIN.

…and the anesthetic began to wear off…and I was hungry, because I hadn’t eaten anything yet today…and the anesthetic was wearing off some more…and then about fifteen minutes of meeting went by without me because I was too busy calculating how many pain pills I’d already taken for this and that today, adding up the milligrams of ibuprofen and acetaminophen already in my system and are you KIDDING me, how much worse could it get…

And then somebody asked me something. Huh?

And then, just as I was actually engaging with my coworkers and providing input (and trying hard not to sound testy), Captain Adventure’s bus arrived.

There’s some good news.

So I shuffle on out there to meet the bus. Which is loud. And gather Captain Adventure off the bus. And he is loud. There is no hiding the fact that I am collecting an autistic six year old off his bus here, not if I can’t be on mute. (Normally, my work day is over by the time his bus arrives; I start wicked early in the morning so that I can be logging off by 3:00, precisely for this reason.) (And also because it can be useful for my teammates who are based Back East, who otherwise find themselves unable to get anything DONE until almost noon their time, thanks to the time difference...me starting at 5:00 in the morning is a godsend for them, on occasion.)

But $DEITY decided to throw me a bone right about then: He had all smileys on his card for the day, which meant he had earned some Wii time, which meant I could keep on working for up to two more hours undisturbed was allowed to give him the positive reinforcement that is a vital part of his behavioral therapy program.

So I set him up and darted back upstairs to finish out that meeting.

And then suddenly three people all started sending instant messages at once.

Hey, if I wanted to know what branches mapped to this division…
I’m looking for this account, and, um, do you know where…
What the HECK, man?! Isn’t this supposed to be over here?!?!

…ugh…really, how did I become the “best” person to ask all these things…?

But then, It happened. The thing that made me say to myself, firmly, “You are shutting down now.”

One of my esteemed colleagues said in an email, “Gee, I don’t know where she got that number.” And I started to fire back a, “From our staging table, DUH!!” because, what, you think I just make these numbers up?!

But then I looked at it again and went, …wait…um…why IS that number in our staging table?! That’s wrong!!!

The wrong number had been selected. The. WRONG. NUMBER!!!!

…but, we just FIXED that, didn’t we? Yes, yes we did, we fixed it, we totally fixed it, we did the fix, and I’d already submitted the results and…

So I opened my test script file and ran the test again for reassu-HOLY EPIC FAILURES, BATMAN!!

I was practically breathing into a paper bag. Over18,000 errors. EIGHTEEN THOUSAND ERRORS! Where literally two days ago, there were ZERO! HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP HOLY CRAP!!!!! What went wrong? Somebody done did something! ACK! SHRIEK! SWOON! PANIC!

…must…remain…calm…type…email…to…tech…team…

And then, as I was trying to figure out how on earth this could have happened, since it meant a serious Process Failure, since it meant somebody was doing crap in production that should never, no NEVER be done there like that…it hit me.

Oh. Yeah. Um? Testing period isn’t actually over yet.

Which means that the fix I’d tested in the user acceptance testing (UAT) environment?

Yeah. It, uh, isn’t in production yet.

Heh-heh. Yeah. Test script is gonna fail in production right now. Because the new code won’t be deployed there for another week. Heh-heh. Eeeeyeah. Still gonna be, you know, doing that thing, where it takes the wrong…from time to time…because there was that group-by that wasn’t getting the true min(value)…whooooo! Yeah. Well. That was…exciting…(and also? ugh…)

Once I finished laughing at myself, I shut down for the night and made some cookies.

Because no matter how ugh your day has been, a soft, warm, chocolate-and-peanut-butter chip cookie surely can’t hurt, right?

…crack!*…

(*kidding! haven’t lost another one…yet…)