The Dream Library

Came home today continuing my unbroken irritable streak, so I went random-walking around the net until I laughed. Thanks to stride for getting me started.

First: Singing Backwards got an eyebrow raised, then both. Well done, and only a couple flubs.

Then: Sports reporter vs. the world’s hottest chile pepper… This can only be a joke. Noone’s got such terrible judgement that they’d… Wow.

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So – being on-call this week is making me grumpy already.

Yesterday’s maintenance window work was to be done by one of my team members – he volunteered because he had to work anyway on something similar. He didn’t show until nearly three hours after the scheduled time – I got a call at 2h30 after and had to cut my evening short to deal with it, but by the time I got to work, he’d shown up. Lose.

Today, the winds blew to the north, and instead of Mary Poppins wandering in (or out), we got the Indians fire blowing over us. That’s deeply unnerving, and confirms to me that the reason I constantly feel like I’ve been eating hair the last week is that I’m inhaling a lot of ash. This fire makes me sad.

Today, we’re preparing for a disaster recovery test. I had to work instead of go to game. That’s okay, stuff like this happens. Everyone did their final signoffs – all the apps are set up right, everything’s ready, according to the folks on the phone. Then half an hour later I get a call from one of the guys on the line – turns out that connectivity was fine for one app, but it was returning errors for every query. Lovely. His response? “Hey, come in early tomorrow so you can figure out what’s up.” Um. I don’t know what’s wrong with your data. If I came in it’d be a whole bunch of ‘yes, this data source is correct. No, there’re no other moving parts.’

*sigh* So I’m grouchy and my mouth tastes like used tree. Is can be Polycon yet?

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When faced with an uncomfortable conversation, or one where you don’t know the shape of the opposition, one often forces the other side to speak first, to declare the playing field.

That happened today when we had a conversation with our division leadership over what we considered, universally, to be an unjust dismissal of one of our peers.

I expected Wade to toss it out to us to open. We all looked at eachother, and after a single pass around the room, I realized that _I_ was the one who was going to start this off.

It was a good conversation for us all – a bitch session, politely handled.

What gets me is that I was the one to pipe up. I was the first voice for our side, and I held the conch often over the duration. I was quiet, retiring, shy, socially incompetent even, before I left for college. I could spend hours pondering what nudged this change along.

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