Everything is working against me today. I woke with a splitting headache, but decided against calling in "sick" because I had work to do. It seems that work had other ideas though.

After a morning trying to get some work done but being continually being interupted by the phone, people knocking on the door, annoying little tasks that pop up and demand immediate attention (as part of the job, really), I gave up and broke for lunch. My headache had not improved, nor had drugs managed to shift it. Maybe I'll have better luck after lunch, I foolishly thought.

T'was not to be. During lunch, some power flickers had caused a few servers to reboot and not come up cleanly - which means a) the UPS is fucked, and b) noone has been able to browse the web or do account administrative stuff. Fine. Fix those servers, investigate the UPS, make sure everything is okay. Not 10 minutes after that was done, and the others had come back from lunch, did the power go out for good.

Great.

Wait a while to see if it comes back quickly. Usually if it's not back within the first 15 or 20 minutes then it's not coming back for a while. Luckilly people actually agreed to shut things on the UPS's down (and now that failed ups did its job - go figure), except fo a few things. No, some people wanted to leave them up because they took forever to start up again once they've gone down: they wanted to leave the file servers and mail servers up until the last minute. Fine, they can deal with it if the UPS doesn't hold out, which, admitedly, it did - but only just (I think that the extra load had they actually tried to shut them down by that stage would have been enough to kill the UPS). By the time that power was restored and the servers had started to be brought back up, it was well after 3. It would be well after 4 before everything would be restored.

One thing that really shits me off sometimes is the 'efficiency' in communication that the people I work with try to use. Or the secrecy. Or the double checking of intentions behind any question, as if you had an ulterior motive or were about to do anything stupid. Or only listenning to the first part of a question. Or just being them. It's very exasperating. What starts off as a simple often becomes an arduous task of dealing with people who have no right or basis to question the work you're doing.

For example, after the power comes back on, and the coworkers start bringing things back up, I come back from a break and ask to help. "How far are we to being back up and running?" I ask. "Nearly there" is the reply. "Cool, so can I bring these two machines up?" I ask, having spyed two machines sitting in a corner (another peeve) that may have escaped being brought back up. "Yup". So I power them on. Only to find that certain things that they depend on aren't running yet. Like the DHCP server. Or the DNS server. So we're not anywhere near back up and running at all, are we? Because those two machines are two of the first couple of machines on the recovery list to be brought back up. A quick question confirms this. So then I try to log into those two machines to shut them down to be restarted later, I'm informed that I won't be able to log onto them. Why? Because I won't know the root password. Refer to secrecy above. And why do I want or need to log into them in the first place, I'm asked. Because I was going to shut them back down for now because they haven't come back up properly. Well of course they haven't come back up properly, they're not even on the network yet, anyway why don't you try ctrl+alt+delete? Well because that's the first thing I tried, but you've disabled it, haven't you? Etc...

It was the last straw. On top of a headache that hadn't budged, a totally unproductive day, the juvenile bullshit from the people I call my coworkers finally got to me. I gave up. I'm done for the day. I am not going to get anything else done. I'm going home.

Then, as I'm walking out the door, there's a cry of "Coward" directed at me. What the...? It's repeated a few times, but when I asked, there was no reason for that forthcoming. Am I a coward because I went home? Am I a coward because I can't put up with that shit anymore today? Am I a coward because I've got a headache? Or am I a coward because they were planning on playing UT2k+4 and thought I didn't want to get beaten? Who the fuck knows. Gobsmacked, I left. And got called a coward again on the way out...