On my way out of work tonight, I fired up my trusty Panny and captured my self-portrait in the mirror-effect of my office windows. I still marvel at my large wall of windows. I spent most of my 26 years working for the State of Illinois in typical surroundings for computer folk: windowless cubicles, basements, computer rooms, etc. I’m one of the ones grateful to have escaped from those dark confines and now have a whole wall devoted to letting in light, or in this case, to mirroring the insides of my office!
I escaped tonight to start a 3 day Christmas holiday, but not before a scare: I received a call at 4:15PM from a tech coordinator in Baltimore, MD saying that a Sun field engineer would be by shortly to do a disk swap on one of our disk servers. I instantly had a sinking feeling that I was in for another 2 - 3 hour wait for the part and tech to arrive and further waiting to get clearance from Baltimore to let the Sun tech go (It happened just like that recently). Not this time, the tech was 5 minutes away, came in, did the hot-swap of a disk and was out the door 10 minutes after he arrived. He had a 2 hour drive to get back to his home base, but I was grateful that it all worked out during business hours.
Since I’m in charge of the computer systems at my location, I signed up to be there for all the after hours emergencies. I’m grateful that it doesn’t happen too often. Those 24/7 monitoring systems? They usually go off between 1AM and 4AM and guess who gets called? Me. Not to worry, that’s just part of the job description and I’m happy to do it. I might be a bit grumpy the next day, but that’s a small price to pay. There’s lot’s of folks without a job. I’m grateful for mine.
Merry Christmas to you all. And to all a good night!
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