Plarking

I have worked almost every weekend since August.

Except that most of the “working” part – at least for the last several weeks – has not been particularly “nose to the grindstone” in nature.

It’s more of the “OK, so, now that everybody else has gotten off the box, now I think I have a shot at getting the next set of 148,672,017 records manipulated for the stupid warehouse.”

Which is long on server talking to itself time, but, once you’ve gotten the necessary code written to start the conversation, is rather short on human has to directly DO something time.

BUT AT THE SAME TIME, well, there are periods throughout the day when the human in charge of the project (hai, yeah, that’s me again) has to do something.

The faster the human realizes that buttons need to be pushed or whatever, and does whatever-it-is, the sooner the whole thing will be done.

(Not that I’m counting, but I thought I’d be “all done” with this @^*&@ing thing over a month ago. ALL done. Go ahead. Ask me how many months of the 18 initial months of “my” stuff are actually loaded right now. NEVER MIND, I WILL TELL YOU ANYWAY: NONE. NONE. NONE. NONE. NOT ONE, NOT ANY, NOT A SINGLE @*^&@ING ONE.)

(…but I’m not bitter…)

(…or frustrated…)

(…or halfway ready to scream “@^*@& it!!” and wash my hands of the whole thing…)

(eh, it’s a big, complicated, screwed up ball of data-barf) (which is possibly the only thing in my world worse than yarn barf) (which can cause me to become so irrationally frustrated that I have been known to sit snarling and cursing for hours attempting to untangle a $3 skein’s worth of said barf instead of doing the logical thing, which would be to toss the whole mess into the trash and say, “Good. Riddance.”) (But I digress.)

ANYWAY. Having worked a full twelve hour day yesterday (ahem) after three “normal” nine hour days, I have already pretty much wrapped up my working week at this point.

Except, of course, that I have a rather enormous set of things queued up to run.

And since they’re new, they kind of need to run under more or less close-ish supervision.

Which means that when I say I’m “done” for the day, I’m totally not done for the day, I’m totally still working.

But, not really-really.

I’ve got two (2) monitors on this desk

On my left, row-counts, progress bars, server-generated emails containing durations, table-sizes, CPU stress, etc. Every so often, something…flashes…at me. And I turn my attention to that monitor, and fiddle with things, and hit buttons like an astronaut trying to get home from Mars.

On my right…World of Warcraft. And the minute the server is back to talking to itself again, my attention snaps back to upholding to honor of the Horde like a rubber band.

Quests are not going to complete themselves, people. (Also, and sadly this is 100% true, if I have something like this on the monitor, the husband won’t start with the “WHY are you still working FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE you need to quit this job blah blah blah nag nag nag etc etc etc” thing…while I agree that the new gig is rather higher pressure and stress than the last one, I’m finding it oddly exhilarating and also I have been forced to learn a lot more about how to manipulate Really Big Data even when it is Really Badly Stored…which is actually kind of fun, in its own way…but I digress…)

ASIDE: When exactly did it become possible for a troll to be…kind of svelte and sexy? Because, seriously? If blue skin and protruding canines are your thing?

My troll avatar is rather hot.

Plus she has kind of punk-ish hair. Awesome.

But I digress. (Again.)

Now, I told you all that so I could tell you this: I have decided that this form of not-exactly-working-not-exactly-not-working should be called plarking.

Playing + Working = Plarking.

(Because plorking? Yeah. That’s something else, entirely…)

(Have a great weekend, y’all…I’m actually not working this weekend because I have been coerced into going to a Renaissance fair instead. However WILL I survive an ENTIRE WEEKEND without my work laptop?!?!?!)

(…but my personal laptop, that’s coming with…because it totally can handle World of Warcraft research, posting blog entries…writing peace treaties for warring nations…you know, important, adult-type stuff…)