14 hour work days are just painful. Especially when they were preceeded by a 14 hour work day and followed by another 14 hour work day. But I suppose such is the price of having your big first launch and all of that blah blah stuff. The back half of last night I thought was going to kill me as it was essentially baby-sitting servers and making sure that only the proper lights were blinking and none of those bad ones. Things went smoothly, the T's never saw over 50% utilization. Which since our product is much more specialized is pretty much around where we expected. We're never going to be some huge million hits a second market. Couple hundred a day makes us estatic. But someone had to baby sit the stuff just the same. And that someone was me. Sure we have other people in IT, but this has been my week to be shafted. Fortunately someone else gets to deal with the weekend and I get to bury myself in much sleep, my Shrek DVD and copious amounts of scotch.

Today has been a brain drain though. It's been a long week, it's a Friday, my motivation to do actual work is almost nil. And let me tell you, if it got to nil that would be more work than I've done thus far.

My copy of Yellow Dog Linux came today which makes me happy. It'll give me something to do when I should be sleeping tonight. I have a couple of old Mac's sitting around at home that I'd like to actually turn in to something useful. Right now they are mostly nifty paper weights. I know I could have downloaded the .iso and all that, but I was having and impulse buy kind of moment.

Right, one more hour here then I have to go to the other office to actually answer phones. I hate phones.

One more day down, one day closer to our launch date, and it's Halloween. Somehow appropriate I think. Most people are sort of ambling around, not much for us to do at the moment besides wait. The Q&A people are doing last minute nit picking and spell checking of everything they can find. All the management types are in meetings doing whatever gets done (or not done) in management meetings. And us here in IT are going over every network system hoping that this thing is going to hold. We're not expecting some overwhelming response, but hey, best to be prepared for thousands upon thousands of visitors.

It's a quiet moment now. We just had lunch, the network is behaving as well as it's going to. I'm using some defunct machines as a foot rest, occassionally kicking them for good measure because they've really pissed me off. Peeps of conversations pass outside our door. Last minute kind of things. People sound a little more panicky than normal as a deadline looms for us.

I wonder about tomorrow. Is it going to be a swarm of activity? Will it be just another day? Be prepared. Drink heavily tonight.

Right, our company is about to do our big web launch in a couple of days. November 1st will be the back show time, let the games begin - it'll be when I get to find out if I keep getting paychecks or not. You know, the important stuff really.

I don't actually write any of the code for our site. Or implement or design any of the code. I don't oversee the code, or anything much at all with it. See, we could change our business model overnight and I probably wouldn't even notice because I don't even look at our website. Dedicated employee, right? Well what I get to do is second line tech support. I don't deal with the great unwashed hoardes, I just deal with the people who make all this stuff up. Yup, I deal with the internal guts of our network and those people who happily break it. And with the launch date looming you better believe that there's a lot of breaking going on. I've found these few moments to escape, have some combos, toss back some Code Red, and ignore the paniced screams of Intermapper as another server tanks.

This job is still shades better than any of the ones I had before. Before I was the front line tech support at a major univerisity - at least they think they're pretty major and some people are inclined to agree, personally they robbed me of my will to live for 4 years so I don't have many nice things to say. Slowly the life comes seeping back to me, but as I take a gander at me inbox I can feel that life slipping right back out. Programmers know just enough to be really dangerous when it comes to making their OS's unstable. And our network. And of course half the IT staff has to head away this weekend to be at our other site for the launch. So we're bracing. And praying. And hiding from people as they scream their copy of Microsoft Project won't let them print in the appropriate shade of turquoise.

So I think I'm going to find some escape here. A littl release if you will. I've never actually commented on Slashdot so no one here knows me, or really cares about me I'm sure. I might post some, who knows. Generally I read a few layers of comments and by that time my head hurts so much that I can't even begin to think about adding my own two cents. Either that or the boss comes in waving papers and pointing about the latest greatest network security exploit that threatens to bring us down from the inside. I just look at him with my eyes glazed over as he says something I'm sure I don't really care about.

Well I've let the phone go unanswered long enough. Time to do that work thing.