Lessee... Auto accident. Followed by fan motor dying and the car starting to overheat, necessitating emergency service costing nearly $800 just a couple days before I take it to the body shop (another $500). Three different products all coming due at the same time at work -- and I mean all within three days -- each with different build requirements and quirks, and I still haven't learned all the ins and outs of Installshield; worse yet, I have to take off half a day twice this week to deal with the car, leaving me with just enough time to panic over minor things. Then the group leader for Documentation mishears the QA team leader and thinks the burn date for the last of the three products has been pushed up by a day, works herself up into a frazzle, and then transmits that frazzle very efficiently to me, causing me to bungle a couple easy things in my panic-induced haste to be ready for a burn that afternoon. At the same time Data Admin drifts by and says, "Oh, we need manual changes to this product database, do that, please, before they burn?" And QA keeps sending me logs at the last minute that say, essentially, "We know the product has acted like this for five years, but we just suddenly wondered, shouldn't act like this instead?" And I have to drop what I'm doing and write up an exquisitely formal and nonconfrontational response that says, basically, "No, if we do that, then you can't actually accomplish anything useful with the product, and that would impact negatively on both performance and sales." Meanwhile, I have to worry about a tax assessor who's coming by the house to do an interior inspection and hope that the place is clean enough to be presentable but not so good looking that we get hit for more taxes. And Peggy's not answering her phone at work so I don't know when she's coming home that night, so I don't know whether to actually cook dinner or just grab burgers when I pick her up from her job at ten freakin' PM at night...
ETA: And I forgot about the problems with our phone... Wednesday morning, I woke at 4:30 AM to see our darkened bedroom intermittently lit by a flashing green light -- which happened to be the "in use" light of our cordless phone set's base station. I picked up one of the handsets and turned it on -- to get an earful of raucous screech. After 12 hours, 1 call to customer service, and visits by two different techs, we had phone service back, but not before discovering that every line to our house had died, and they had to run entirely new cable to us to restore the dial tone. The only good thing was it was all external to us, so it was entirely on the phone company's dime -- we didn't have to pay a thing. -- Bob
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One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
ETA: And I forgot about the problems with our phone... Wednesday morning, I woke at 4:30 AM to see our darkened bedroom intermittently lit by a flashing green light -- which happened to be the "in use" light of our cordless phone set's base station. I picked up one of the handsets and turned it on -- to get an earful of raucous screech. After 12 hours, 1 call to customer service, and visits by two different techs, we had phone service back, but not before discovering that every line to our house had died, and they had to run entirely new cable to us to restore the dial tone. The only good thing was it was all external to us, so it was entirely on the phone company's dime -- we didn't have to pay a thing. -- Bob
---------
One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.