whimper

So I thought, you know, tonight I'll just try to sleep. No chemical assistance. Yeah, that'll be fun. And maybe I'll get up at a decent time....

Yeah, like 11 p.m.

And tomorrow's pucker day at work. Launching a new site Monday -- well, we have to launch it Monday -- and of the two people who know our online publishing system, one's gone on a family emergency, the other's moi. And of the one person who knows the new e-mail system...oh, wait, that's me again. I did docs for it yesterday. In 20 minutes. About nine pages. Quasi-boss impressed.

But things are afoot at work what concern me. Not as in "involve" me, as in "worry" me. More later. Mayhap half an Ambien....

pinball lizard

And here I was afraid all of my contributions to society were outdated or hypothetical. I mean, aside from the obvious "exhales carbon dioxide, which is needed by plants to survive" bit. No, I forgot, thanks to the tutelage of my brother, I did develop one skill which has served me well and which will surely create a new golden age for mankind.

I am still very good at pinball.

( Bing bing bing bing bing PTCHONK rattle rattle kaCHANG! )

Why I shouldn't work on 90 minutes of sleep

Today was pretty much a total loss. And I probably had the best day of anyone on staff. The quasi-boss uploaded the wrong file and lost two hours of work to his very vocal, emphatic and almost frightening fury. The real-boss came back reluctantly from his ailing father's side 140 miles away for a dentist appointment which got mistakenly cancelled and spent a few hours hunting down one field in a 16MB database. One of my favorite coworkers' section is being dissolved and she's probably leaving in days. One of my coworkers sent the nightly newsletter without updating the headlines ("Gee, didn't I get this yesterday?"). One of my coworkers uploaded a file into the wrong server and knocked our front page offline for 15 minutes. Me? Well.

I'm building a new, standalone e-mail client for subscribers to one specific section. I'm taking the code straight from a preexisting database which currently consists of about 1500 users. I did a search-and-replace for 'databasename' and replaced it with 'newdatabasename.' Important: I used single quotes. There is ONE instance in all the code where I used double-quotes. (I was just learning the language, be kind.) So, when testing today, I sent a slightly comedic test e-mail intended for the three of us and thankfully I noticed very quickly it was being sent to the old database -- of 1500 users.

Not everyone got it. But enough did. The executive editor, half the staff, a good chunk of the capital city. The link wasn't valid, the message made reference to "Apollo 13" and "engineers, techies and other misfits" in reference to our online design staff. This was at about 4 this afternoon. Everyone else thought it was funny. I said many naughty things very loudly very often. Angry, disappointed.

And then the hour's drive home let me think. Life's not all that bad. My flock is healthy. I'm not broke. Our first Direct Deposit went through one day early. I still have all limbs, digits, eyes and I can eat food now. Quasi-boss promised me I'd laugh about it eventually. Tomorrow, I think, after playing with the flock and some Unisom. If spamming 1000 people with concrete evidence that my IQ is smaller than my shoe size is the worst thing that happens to me, I'm not doing all that bad.