Apparently, I care about my birthday a bit more than I thought….because this last one sucked _completely_.  A horrible week at work, that is continuing on this week…and I did nothing for my birthday.  Most of the people I hang out with already had plans.  There were also other circumstances that led to the day sucking even moreso.

The work situation? Isn’t showing any glimpse of changing any time soon..

You’d think if you said the following to your boss, he’d be concerned and talk to you about it:

Me: Why are they asking you about this? Are they afraid to ask me about this?
Him: Yep, they are afraid you’ll yell at them
Me: Trust me, I won’t yell.  I’m beyond yelling at this point.  I’m resigned to my place in this group.
(Note: It’s not yelling, but apparently, they have virgin ears and immediately assume the use of the word "fuck" in any incarnation even once indicates yelling.  They’ve apparently never been to Boston or NYC.)

It doesn’t help, that I keep seeing the "aftermath" footage of hurricane gustav, and the prep for Hanna…and think "God, I’d give ANYTHING to be there, dealing with that."  Yes, I’m disappointed I didn’t get called up to go south to help out…and NO it doesn’t give me "joy" to see the devastation that these people have experienced.  It’s just, shit happens, period.  I just wanna be there to deal with the shit when it happens.

Even after 2 days/nights of being with friends and enjoy life, I still feel the frustration of this past week taking its toll still.  Its week like these that remind that there is still a huge disconnect between myself and my boss.  His reality checks keep bouncing as far as what my work load is like, or how competent the rest of the team (save one person, J) isn’t.   I’m so bored and unchallenged in my job currently, that I’m desperately seeking change.  I’m the type of worker that is constantly looking for a challenging project to take on, even if I have to "invent" one.  I keep telling him this….I’m not sure how many times I’ve flat out told him that I’m bored out of my mind in my job. In that time, he’s managed to find _one_ challenging project for me to takeover.  I’ve found a couple of others in that time on my own, and thankfully, they’ve been deemed "high priority".  However, because of the aforementioned incompetency of teammates, I’ve spent 1.5 days worth of time on this latest project.  I’ve had to twice tell the PM to push the deadline for completion back 3 days.  Having to do this, makes me incredibly pissy.  Finally, on Friday, I’d just about how my fill of the incompetency when the "engineer" on duty spent 2.5 days looking into a problem.  The problem was of course then handed off to me.   This was one of the few times that the engineer actually knew more about it than I did….and I tried explaining that, but still got handed it.  At this point, I was fairly pissed off and fed up, so I took the "issue" and without any prior info from the "engineer" fixed it in a matter of an hour.  WTF DID HE DO FOR 2.5 DAYS!  And *I* GUESSED at the solution.  This pissed me off even _more_ than the fact that I’d had yet another issue being dropped on me because people lack troubleshooting/problem solving skills.

Some of this I think is me…I really do assume that anyone in a technical field has a certain level of logical thinking and problem solving.  What is incredibly simple and evident to me, is just clearly not to others.  It was told to me recently that I seriously underestimate my skills and abilities, especially in my resume.  The term "SME" (Subject Matter Expert) has come up multiple times, and often as a description of my skillset in my current position.  I hate this term, and I hate even more when someone says that I am one.  I am not an expert.  An expert, to me, implies that I have nothing more (or very little) to learn about a specific subject.  In the areas which I’m considered a SME, I still have massive amounts to learn.  The only thing I’ll admit to, is that I have a good understanding of the basic end to end functionality of our platform.  I don’t think that makes me a SME though.

So, about 9pm Wednesday night, we took a power hit in our lab server room at work.  This room has about 200 servers, and for some idiotic reason I’ve yet to figure out, isn’t on generator power.  Each rack has a UPS though, so in theory, it should outlast a power blip.  Unfortunately, the HVAC requires a manual restart.  So, what’s that mean?

Closed room + 200 servers + no ventilation/cooling + 12 hrs (how long before it was brought to our attention) = 109 degrees in the COOLEST part of the room.

The door to the server room was actually warm to the touch, and pulling out the keyboard drawer made me go "ooh, that’s _hot_".  This is something I’ve been through before, and had a heads up about it on the way to the office.  It’s very similar to a mass casualty incident, you triage and move as quickly as possible through.  And well, you do usually have some casualties as computers don’t like to work in that heat.  Today’s count: 5 dead power supplies (that we know of, we likely will have some hardware issues stemming from this in the near future).

This is probably the 10th time I’ve gone through this since being there..so it’s kind of become "routine".  A year ago though, when it was just J and I dealing with it, we would have a good majority back online by noon.   We wouldn’t have to communicate much, we very quickly divided up and conquered. Today? Well, things have changed and we have more resources. But more resources does not equal quality.  I basically spent the entire day being server/hardware monkey and dealing with these "remote" resources who were trying earnestly to help…but who lack the troubleshooting expertise or even clue on how to get through this.  Just trying to get them to focus instead of looking and thinking of everything that had to be brought up was a task in futility.  They are good people, but it’s just not a good time to try to teach someone troubleshooting skills…at all.

There’s a very specific order that is necessary to bring everything back up and have it working…if you ignore this order, you’ll be fighting issues for a while.  It’s an extremely complex/integrated system.   Focus became the word of the day for these more junior "engineers", but it’s frustrating being the one telling them to focus.   It’s also frustrating when they compliment you on the documentation you’ve written to cover this (like I said, we’ve been through this a few times), and yet, I still had to hold their hands and guide them through the document step by step.

 5 PM came, and we still had very little back up, as something was just off with each environment, but not in the same way to point to one specific thing.  I was asked to stay and handle it…and was offered more resources from our India team..  I finally just started working on it declining the extra resources, and had the environments back up approximately 10pm.

I did have to make one sanity call to an extremely knowledgeable engineer as after looking at stuff for 6 hrs, and not getting different results was driving me up a wall.  As we were discussing the issue and checking configuration files, I managed to stumble across a stale mount that ultimately had been the source of the issue (the config for an obscure and never used component could not be loaded).  Man, I felt like an idiot.  Although, it was nice to have this engineer talk to me as a peer and actually sound impressed that I figured out that that was the issue after all.

Yeah, I know, long post…but I think I just needed to vent and get this out.  The only good thing is…there is no way in hell I’m working tomorrow.

So…I think once I’m done with my ALS internship, I’m going to try to get my paramedic.  Thankfully, there’s a very good chance I can get the county to actually pay for this.

It’s interesting, one of my goals in life is to also get a bachelors degree…and I’m more willing to put my time towards the pursuit of this than get my butt in gear for a degree.  Although, any degree I _want_ would not qualify to be paid for by my company. I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t pay for a degree in emergency/disaster management.  Also, this degree is not exactly easy to find at all. There are a few programs that carry it, but I am leery about the accreditation of the program.  I want to be the one putting together emergency/incident action plans, or taking command of a major incident.  I find all of that to be extremely challenging.

Let me caveat the above…I don’t take pleasure in the misfortune in others in the way it sounds often.  But it’s more that my philosophy is that "shit happens" and I just wanna be there when it happens.

I hate being in IT. I get bored incredibly easily in IT and I get frustrated as well.  I don’t do well at being bored.  I have occasional moments that are challenging, but I find that in order to stay challenged in IT, I usually have to change jobs every 2 years.  (gee…I’m overdue….and I’m bored….I hope the internal position comes through, it’d be challenging for about 2 years!).  I almost curse that I’m good at my job…it kind of becomes the "easy" thing to do.

I am so glad it’s the weekend…considering I worked both days of last weekend due to a project at work, I’ve been looking forward to just having this weekend.   Today was a really nice low key day as I took a coworker and his wife to Doukenie to help celebrate her birthday.  They’d never really been wine tasting, but they enjoyed it enough to become club members.  I joked with someone there that with as many people as I’ve been recruiting for their club lately, I should get something   We left Doukenie and stopped by the outlet mall in Leesburg.  Man, that’s just dangerous for me.  The Coach store has moved and is much BIGGER!  Once done shopping, we headed over to Clyde’s in Ashburn for dinner.  It turned out to be a very nice low key day.

I can officially practice my medic stuff in VA now.  And I’m looking forward to starting my internship with the County. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of time and effort, but will be very relieved when it’s done.

Right now, I’m watching the very first episode of SNL that was ever aired, and it’s kind of like watching ghosts.  It’s being aired obviously in remembrance of George Carlin…but just to watch so many people (John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman, Jim Henson) that you know died long before they should have is kind of eery.

Tomorrow, I really would like to do _nothing_, but with the upcoming move, I really should work on packing.

Also, I’m kind of irritated with the fear mongering and panic on the TV news about "OH NOES THERE WILL BE BLOOD IN DC NOW THAT GUNS ARE ALLOWED!"  I actually don’t think the crime rate will notably change either way.

This week is going and beyond to be just insane.

Monday: Work then putting ambulance in service with my chief and one other person overnight.

Tuesday:  Work then headed out to dinner with some friends, then have to go to the firehouse to pick up the excursion for the next day.

Wednesday: ACLS (being held at Prince William Hospital in Manassas) then county fire association cookout and meeting.

Thursday: ACLS (same place), teleconference meeting with county’s Chief Training Officer, and take excursion back to the firehouse.

Friday: Work, then nothing right now…I almost hope it stays this way.

Saturday: Cajun Festival at Breaux Vineyards

Sunday: putting engine in service with my chief, then have to work bingo.

Monday: fire department membership meeting, and then potentially putting ambo in service after….

I can’t even think beyond then what’s going on.

I sooooo needed this.  It was so good to be outside in the ball park, not concerned about what someone at work is going to screw up next and how much time it’ll take me to fix it….not dealing with the younger fire department members who seem to need coddled (that’s a whole other rant entirely, and has to do with the generation that is just becoming adults).

Anyway, 2nd day of my mini-tour of baseball games!  Today was Nationals at Mets.  While the weather forecasts had called for rain today last I had looked, it turned out to be a GORGEOUS spring day.

I managed to upload my photos, here.  Anyway. I’m tired, and tomorrow is Mets at Indians (yay!).  I haven’t decided what to do Sunday though.

I’m here in Port Saint Lucie, FL for BASEBALL!  YAY!

I really needed to get away before someone at work died due to their stupidity (ie: I finally crack after having the same question asked OVER and OVER.  It gets old FAST).  I do need to get myself further unplugged though, but it’s apparently hard to do this cold turkey

I have some things in my life that I’m pondering over what to do next with them, what to pursue, etc.  Distracting myself to the point that things that are just pissing me off in my life aren’t even in my mind actually allows me to clear my head and pontificate upon anything that I otherwise have had trouble thinking.

So far, the trip started out okay, with only mild irritation by the throngs of college kids who are "Spring Break!"ing it down here this week/weekend.  But finally, I got to Thrifty to pick up a rental car….they started to give me a PT Cruiser.   Well, I’m sorry, but I think that is one of the lamest/saddest/ugliest cars ever in existence.  The next words out of the guy’s mouth though were "We are running a special this weekend! You can upgrade to a 300M or Charger for just a little bit more…"   I asked how much, and I was more than willing to pay $40 more for the entire weekend to just dump the PT Cruiser (not to mention how much I drool over the Charger!).  So, I’m driving a really sexy Dodge Charger (no, it’s not an R/T, but it IS at least red and not completely neutered).  Oh MY GOD!  I giggled as I drove to the hotel.  And I’m still giggling every time I drive it.

I got to the hotel (technically in Fort Pierce, FL), and wow, what a dump.  Apparently, I know Days Inn is not known as being high luxury, but I just need a place with internet access, a bed, a shower, and potentially a tv.   I got to the room and "inspected" it…and promptly went back and asked them to go clean the bathroom again or give me a new room.  They VERY promptly cleaned it (judging by the lot now, I’m not sure they have  any spare rooms)…I’d seen yellow spots where a guy (yes, I’m making an assumption here…) had clearly missed the toilet completely.  EW EW EW EW EW.

After that, brought my stuff in and took a nap.  Red eye flights suck.  Got up, found my way to Tradition Field in Port St Lucie…nice little ballpark.  I managed to find free parking too as I had no cash on me for the normal parking   I was surprised at how packed the ball park was.  It was the Orioles vs. Mets, not a common matchup.  When I looked at the bullpen warming up, I was extremely happy to see Johan Santana warming up!  He pitched 7 innings of the game.  I am very much looking forward to see what he does for the Mets ballclub this year.  In the end, the Mets won 7-0.

And tomorrow….Nationals vs. Mets!