The Aerie

My So-Called Life (or One Week in the Nuthouse)

My friends and family, who care about me very deeply, frequently express concern with my lifestyle and stress levels. "Take a break," they tell me, "have some fun." So here I am again in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the U-Con Gaming conference, which has inexplicably become the focus of my roleplaying acquaintances' annual hajj.

But in order to get here, in order to "take a break," and "have some fun," I had to just about kill myself. It's hard for me to have fun on a vacation because I could get the bends if I tried to decompress too quickly. Let's take a look at the last week, a typical week in my life...

FRIDAY

Let's start with last weekend, which is about as far back as my memory extends. Take for granted that last week was a "normal" week: I billed 40 hours of time, and spent most evenings engaged in some kind of activity that kept me out of the house.

On Friday afternoon I approached the weekend with ridiculous expectations: namely that in the face of my youngest's 10th birthday party on Sunday, I might nonetheless get some of my own stuff done.

Silly, silly old man.

Friday evening my spouse and I sat down and listed everything that I needed to do before the party. If I got my part of the family chores accomplished, I understood that what time remained would be my own. Sweep and mop the kitchen, clean the bathroom, make and decorate the birthday cake. No problem, thought I. I would do some of the cleaning immediately, Friday night, and the rest on Saturday morning, leaving Saturday afternoon free and clear. Then I passed out at 8:00 p.m. and woke up 11 hours later.

SATURDAY

Cleaning, cleaning, chores, cleaning and chores. Collapsed in front of Saturday Night Live, I think, but I can't clearly remember.

SUNDAY

The our families arrived at 4:00 on Sunday afternoon, and were greeted by the wasted apparition that had once been me. In addition to my stated duties, I had washed a mattress, beaten rugs, vacuumed the living room, shopped for groceries, etcetera, etcetera. I was wiped. You could have knocked me over with a dirty look, and I would out of habit have tried to clean it before hitting the floor.

I summoned up what good spirits I could and made my way through the party to its frosting-covered conclusion, at which time our friend Debbie absconded with my wife to see a showing of "Ray." In their absence I decided to watch two videos due back the next day, re-visiting the grandfather of "The Matrix," "Dark City" (of which I remembered little) and watching Frida. I thought Salma Hayek portrayed the iconoclastic Mexican painter with great emotive skill and thespian artistry, and a delightful lack of clothing.

Between movies I finished cleaning up from the party, putting the kids to bed, and watching the end of "Frida" with my wife, who returned from "Ray" and fell sleep on the living room couch. I finally hit the sack about 12:30 a.m., exhausted.

MONDAY

Monday I got to work at 7:00 a.m. because I had a noon report due. I planned to leave at 3:00 but was trapped at work until 4:00. In a happy development, my book "Mitlanyal" was back from the printers two days early. I drove from work to pick up my copies of the book and have a beer with my publisher, then went home for dinner. I think I managed to get a toe in the water on my UK project, and got a decent night's sleep.

TUESDAY

Tuesday I was in at 7:00 a.m. again, to prep for an overnight implementation job that I wanted to be successful, and also because I had to leave work early. At 3:30 I met my family at the Children's Theater to see my dear daughter in a marvelous little play that she and her colleagues wrote as part of her CTC class. It was a delightfully subversive play called "Jericho and the Land of Lies." It featured a tyrannical "King George" who forced everyone to speak in opposite terms, and renamed muffins "pencils," until overthrown by the populace and his own disaffected advisors. Hopefully my pride and pleasure managed to shine through the cloud of stress and tension hovering about me.

Following her play the family made a quick visit to Famous Dave's for a dinner of greasy mutilated pre-cooked cow- and pig-flesh, and then returned to the CTC where by coincidence we had tickets for that evening's performance of "Frog and Toad." A marvelous confection which I would have enjoyed more if I hadn't been watching the clock with one eye, because I was due back at work to start the overnight implementation at 9:00 p.m.

The play finished just in time, and I parted with my family in the lobby and drove back to work, arrving at 8:58.

WEDNESDAY

Despite my preparations, the implementation was not successful, meaning I worked from 9:00 p.m. until 3:30 a.m. and got to bed at 4:30 a.m. feeling frustrated and stressed. I got back to work at noon, and spent the afternoon desperately trying to figure out what was wrong with the prior two attempts to implement the project.

Unfortunately I had Writing Group on Wednesday night. While I was happy to have the group over, especially to show off my books, I was distracted and tense about the final attempt to implement the change. I was scheduled to leave the next morning at 5:30 a.m., and had hoped to get a good night's sleep. At 8:55 p.m. I excused myself from writing group and went to the basement, where I phoned into the conference call and logged in remotely to try once again to implement the project.

Remote implementation was risky because it would be very slow and cumbersome - if stuff went awry, I would have to drive in to work. Since I was slated to leave on my trip at 5:30 a.m., driving downtown would trim precious minutes off my sleep schedule.

When the time came to implement the project, everything went suspiciously well. By 10:30 I had made the necessary changes, and preliminary tests showed they worked.

Then I got the cell-phone call from the disgruntled system administrator of a totally unrelated business unit. Apparently during the Tuesday night implementation attempt, something that they needed had gotten stomped. Since I'd broken a working system, I was obligated to fix it.

Cell phone signal in my basement office is weak enough that I have to put the cell in the transom window and sit hunched forward in order for the headset cable to reach my ears. My main implementation was already occupying my home phone line. So at one point I sat there with a phone on each ear, trying to modify two things at the same time. Stress? What stress?

Fortunately my project lead chose that moment to log in and check my status, and I gratefully accepted his offer to fix the thing I'd broken Tuesday night. By 11:30 he'd fixed it, and one worry was put aside.

THURSDAY

But now another reared its ugly head - despite initial good results, my main implementation was having problems. The "expert" who was supposed to test the changes, a fellow who brough a quiet voice and a thick Italian accent to the scratchy conference call, couldn't get his program to work. As far as I could tell, everything that I was responsible for was functioning, and the problems were due to his own incompetence. But that same incompentence prevented him from recognizing the situation and letting me go, so I was obliged to sit and wait while he brought in a tech support consultant from England.

A two-hour wait ensued, during which I had to remain available for the moment the tech support guy arrived.

This jolly fellow logged in, looked around, and then said, "Oh, sorry, my shift is up and I'm off for home, so I'll hand you off to someone else." And back into the waiting queue we went.

Now, during these hours I was not idle, but neither was I sleeping. I washed laundry for my trip and dried it, packed my bags in a desultory, sleep-addled fashion, and watched a truly awful episode of Farscape Season 1. (I've been assured that subsequent seasons and episodes improve dramatically - meanwhile I'm learning to appreciate the statuesque blue Virginia Hey.)

Finally at 3:00 a.m. the second tech support consultant logged in, corrected the Italian fellow's misconfiguration, and my implementation was acknowledged a success.

VACATION!

After some consideration over the merits of sleeping versus remaining awake, I decided to grab what shuteye that I could. Two hours later I was up, taking a bleary shower, and an hour later I was on the road for Michigan.

My voluntary turn at the wheel took us from Rockford to the Michigan border, and I slept much of the rest of the time. We arrived at dinnertime, and had a nice long sit-and-chat at the nearby Bennigan's. Finally we retired to the motel and here I finally am.

I'm so tired I'm twitching. The hands on my internal clock are bobbing uselessly at the end of long springs jutting out its face. And anyone who actually read all the way down to here seriously needs more to do with their life.

FRIDAY 1:00 A.M.

But that's the story. That's how I got 40 hours of billable work done in three days, and why I am here in Ann Arbor, exhausted, tense, ringing with fatigue, insomniac, and ready to attempt to calm down and enjoy myself for the weekend. To do so I will have to put aside my displeasure at missing my son's actually birth-date (this Sunday), missing my family, and missing out on the annual Calhoun Square Coffee Festival once again. But on the upside I will have my books to console me, and of course the adoration of the scores of role-playing-game-supplement groupies sure to throng around me when I arrive.

I gotta get some sleep. Then I gotta have some fun. That's going to be a lotta work.

Posted by Albatross at November 18, 2004 11:58 PM