Tuesday : 08 November 05
I didn’t oversleep this morning. That was a “good” thing. Unfortunately, it was one of the few good things about the morning.

When I got to work, I was mentally preparing for a few co-workers to migrate from the SLC office to our bright, shiny office in Utah County. I was informed that there would be three of them. No problem. They arrived, told me where they planned to work and I then set about getting their systems patched into the network. Again, no problem. Until I finished connecting the last set of cables and was putting the covers back on the patch panels. THAT is when one of the three came in to tell me that he and one of the others were going to move to other desks.

*twitch*

Okay. Open the panels again and add in the new wires. I wasn’t so much irritated as annoyed at having to do this. They had ample time to have requested the change before I started wiring things. Oh, well.

Just as I finished up with this job, one of the much-higher-ups tracked me down and asked if I’d get his office set up. Paradigm shift. I had no problem with this… mainly because he’s higher on the food chain than everyone else in our office. You want access? You got it! He said that he didn’t need it immediately, as he had to go to the SLC office today, so I asked him if tomorrow morning would be all right. (Yes, folks, engineering concepts straight out of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott’s notebook: Never give the captain an exact time for completion of a job. Give yourself some breathing room and get it done well before the deadline.) I found his office’s port numbers, hooked up my laptop and headed to the server room to make the necessary connections.

And nothing happened.

I went back into the office. Laptop on. Cables connected. No “link” or “activity” lights. It’s not as though the guys who ran all of the office’s cables came down last week to test and label everything. “Correctly.” *sigh* Great. So, I made sure that the laptop’s connection was good and headed back to the server room. I had to test all of the ports in a given range to find the correct one. Eventually, I did.

Lights blinked on. Connections were made. Things were good again.

Until the coworker whom I am now referring to as Voldemort – because saying “He Who Shall Not Be Named” takes way too much time – came to ask me a question. One of the same questions that he’s been asking for the past couple of weeks. I think that I was a little terse with my response. Actually, I’m pretty sure that I was. I informed him (again) that the problem was being worked on and would basically be done when it was done. And then I went back to what I had been working on. Some people’s children…

The rest of the workday wasn’t too bad. Today’s workout was a bit on the lax side, at least for me. My stomach had been bothersome for most of the morning, so I didn’t want to do something that would cause me to leave unwelcome things on the gym floor.

After work, I met and Matt (we need to get him a number or something) for coffee. , who works nearby, popped in for a bit – she was making sure that I didn’t need a ride home. A while later, was released from the life-draining REC and joined us. We sat around and chatted for a bit before going our separate ways.

By the time I got to the house, my back was bothering me. Enough that I decided to take a long, hot soak. Hotter than James Brown’s Celebrity Hot Tub, but nowhere near as entertaining. My back and stomach both seemed to relax. This made me rather happy. I got out of the tub and made my way to the den to watch a couple of hours of Law & Order: The Next Generation… um… I mean Law & Order: SVU. Both episodes were good. While watching TV, I had the stray thought to check my temperature. The way that my back had been feeling was very similar to the way that it feels when I’m getting/have a fever.

I was right. It wasn’t a bad one.. but it was enough to be noticeable.

I checked a little while later and it had gone down a bit. Apparently, the hot soak was a good thing – I think that I sweated a good bit of the fever out. I’m still not quite up to 100% (I’d say that I’m in the lower to mid 90s, though), so I think that tonight will be another early one.

Stray Toasters

And with that…

Namaste.