And then, The Stupid ate me

Today. Was. So. STUPID.

There. I said it. Today was one of those days that end up being a nearly complete waste of time, a day wherein nothing wants to just go right, a day when, upon coming to the end of it, you still totally are not done.

First of all, I inexplicably woke up at – I kid you not – about 1:30 a.m. And then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I wasn’t just restless, I was wired. Heart racing, WIDE awake, not exactly ‘rarin’ to go’ but feeling more like 9 a.m. than 2 a.m., you know?

Ugh.

So I stubbornly stayed in bed anyway until about 2:30, when I finally admitted that getting back to sleep was simply not going to happen, got up, and worked on a reconcile-to-accounting that isn’t going at all well for me overall.

Because 2:30 in the gah-dahn morning is the perfect time to work on something frustrating that has thus far resisted the efforts of about five different people to figure out.

…oh, but it CAN’T be the source system, see, because we balance that sucker every single month…(ya, well, then, how come it doesn’t balance NOW, huh? huh? HUH?!)

Meanwhile, I had two meetings today that were in-person. Which was bad news for me because The Husband is traveling for business today, which means that I am the sole parental unit and thus must be available for both the morning hand-off and the evening hand-off.

So the earliest I can get into the office is around 9:30, and then I have to jet outta there by 2:30 to (reliably) get home by 5:30.

I left at 7:00 this morning, missed the ACE train by a handful of moments, which as it turned out was good because, well, I’ll get to that.

It took 90 minutes to get to BART (versus 30 minutes at my ‘normal’ hour), and then I began the desperate, pathetic circling looking for a parking space, while casting a resentful eye at the whole entire EMPTY lot of ‘permit only before 10:00 a.m.’ spaces.

It took me forty minutes – FORTY. MINUTES. – to find a parking space.

And I had to drive to a different BART station to get it.

So, I finally staggered into the office at ten o’clock in the morning.

Having already been up for over eight hours.

Which is why I had already consumed about four double shots of espresso.

So I walked into the (formerly) quiet little office like this:

 

 YIPPEE, HOW THE HECK IS EVERYBODY?!

HOT ENOUGH FOR YA OUT THERE?!

WHAT’S UP WITH THAT, ANYWAY?!?!

SAN FRANCISCO, BABY!

SHOULDN’T BE, LIKE, A MILLION DEGREES!!

!!!!!     I’M     JUST      SAYIN’   !!!!!

WHATCHA DOIN’, CODING?

THAT LOOKS COOL!

HEY! HEY! HEY!

YOU KNOW WHAT? I’VE BEEN CODING TOO!

CODING IS SO AWESOME!

LETS GO TO STARBUCKS

AND GET ANOTHER ROUND

TO CELEBRATE

THE AWESOMENESS

THAT IS CODING!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

CODING!

{JAZZ HANDS!!}

(…eeeeeeeeeeyeah…I’m sure my coworkers just love it when I inject enough caffeine into my system to simulate jet fuel…because obviously, my “normal” level of bouncy-spazzy energy just isn’t bouncy enough)

(yeah, it’s true, I generally run to the…excessively cheerful and/or friendly and/or forcefully passionate about picayune data-details nobody ELSE cares about and/or ridiculously energetic side most of the time and can’t seem to hold onto Some Other Persona [like, maybe, I dunno, a sane, PROFESSIONAL person…] at work for any length of time…I know, that probably comes as a complete shock, seeing as how I am so dull and placid and mature and other boring adjectives on the blog here…)

So basically, I arrived just in time for my first meeting. And my manager was pinging me (poor man, he got about eight seconds of my attention and then I was all “flit! flit! flit!” to meetings), and then there was a lot of intense “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah!” among various parties, and while a lot of it was useful information for some of us, there was also a certain amount of cross-purposes going on.

Which is bound to happen when the overall communication about what we’re doing is a bit iffy. Person 1 thinks we’re talking about apples, Person 2 thinks it’s oranges, and Person 3 is sharing photos of their cat and can’t understand why everybody keeps saying “OK, so, um, let’s move on…” because isn’t this all about sharing cat pictures?!

And then it was 2:30 so I walked out of the last meeting before it was technically over to head for the train so that I could get home in time to let Vanessa the Great leave on time and what do you mean, ‘major delays,’ BART…?

Because there was a fire ‘near’ the tracks, basically BART went into a catatonic state. So my Dublin-bound train suddenly turned into a MacArthur-bound train (MacArthur not being on the Dublin line at all)…and we all got off the train and milled around uncertainly and then it turned out that when the operator had said to go “upstairs” (which led not to another platform, but to, uh, the exit…?) to wait for the Dublin trains to eventually start up again, he meant go “downstairs” so most of us missed the one and only Dublin train to enter that station for a long, long time.

But I caught the next Fremont one.

And then I got off at Bayfair to wait for the Dublin train.

And waited.

And waited.

Announcements about ‘recovering from’…still waiting…two Fremont trains go through…some train that doesn’t stop…another Fremont train…eight cars, nine cars, six cars…

Eventually, a four car Dublin train pulled in, carrying approximately half the population of the Bay Area, seeing as how it was the first Dublin-bound train in about six days.

NOW. If I had caught the ACE train this morning? I would have been sunk. I would have missed that train home and been an hour later than I wanted to be.

BUT, thanks to the happy badness that was missing it? Well, I hopped into my car and drove home through traffic that was surprisingly less awful than I expected, and skidded in the door just in time to allow Vanessa the Great to leave on time, which gave me a temporary feeling of being a hero. YAY, ME.

Which feeling was promptly replaced with the aw, nuts, I SUCK feeling, because:

• I never did send my manager the list of tables he wanted
• There is laundry in piles all over the house - again
• I also am still right where I was four days ago on, well, everything
• Which means that I am now four days EVEN LATER with everything
• …crap-apples…
• The Denizens want dinner – I have nothing whatsoever ready to go
• Too many things still don’t balance in the warehouse
• Somebody needs a physical for some sport-thing or other, but I honestly can’t remember who
• I still haven’t written the code to sweep the unbalanced things into a “these don’t balance, but, here they are, just, you know, understand that they don’t balance, OK?” bucket
• My back started killing me this weekend, and it’s not getting better, it’s getting steadily worse and is beginning to impinge on my ability to do things like climb stairs and drive a car…I should probably go see my doctor, but a) I don’t have time and b) I inexplicably only remember that I “should” do so after business hours
• PLUS, I haven’t even started the pulls for the actual “for real” load into the ‘final’ production warehouse, which is going to be due very soon…
• …but of course, it’s going to be hard to do those loads if I don’t solve the problems that came up during this proof-of-concept run…
• …AND, now the caffeine is starting to wear off, leaving me in a state where attempting to continue working is not merely going to end up being futile, but might actually be dangerous…if I’m ever going to hit ‘execute’ on an ill-advised TRUNCATE TABLE statement, it’s going to be when I’m like this, all bleary and exhausted and feeling like a certified loser (and thus like I have something to prove, which results in me being a stubborn moron, which leads to ill-advised swipes of the ‘execute’ button on code that never should have been written in the first place…

Eh well. I think…what I’m going to do is…kick off the Big Mondo Pull Of Doom +10 Now With Loading All The Data There Ever Was and let it run overnight while I do something I can’t harm.

Like knitting a sock or something.

(…and that, children, is how Tama ended up knitting an elephant trunk cozy that she thought was going to be a sock for Eldest…)