Christmas Eve

I've finished all my christmas shopping, and delivered all the gifts I need to give out. That feels good.

I was on my way to my favorite butcher and to the wine shop to pick up Christmas dinner. It will be a solo affair, but I don’t mind. Cooking for myself is a worthwhile endeavor, there is no one more appreciative. Food is the second greatest sensual pleasure. I don’t understand folks who eat over their sink from a can when dining solo.

I got a call on my cell, it was Dave (my boss). “Rich, I need you to get into the office and rebuild 5.4 on Linux.”

“Uh, I’ll kick it off from home. No problem.”

“Yes, problem.” He sounded irritated. “I need it rebuilt and tested as soon as possible. That means I need you to watch the regression test and fix anything that fails.”

“What was changed?”

“The access methods for the data recovery module. They were causing a memory leak. We need to get a patch out to Minneapolis yesterday. Every minute counts.”

“The regressions should be fine. I’ll set it up to text me at the end of the tests and I’ll check ‘em then. It’s the 21st century – I can do this remotely.” And it’s Christmas – no one is even in at the customer’s offices anyway – I thought to myself.

“Look I had Eric in overnight working on the fix. Now I need you to baby sit the tests. I know it’s Christmas, I know it’s last minute, but I need you to do this. We all need to pull together on this. Now can you get into the office?”

“OK.” I pulled the car over to turn around. “I’ll do it.”

“Thanks. Please call me when it’s done.”

“What if that’s 3:00 a.m.?”

“Call me the minute it’s tested and packaged. I don’t care what time it is.”

“OK. Talk to you in 15 to 20 hours.” This is crap! I am being asked to sit and watch 10 computers run tests on our application for the next 15 hours or more. This on the off chance that there might be a problem, that I might not be able to do anything about.

I think Dave lives for this kind of thing. I could do this remotely, that’s why God invented WiFi – worse case we’d lose a few hours. Our build and QA environment is not geared to run remotely, but I could get the job done.

My Christmas Eve is shot – probably my Christmas as well. Hope your’s is going well. Good thing I’m not throwing the big party.

Just at that moment I realized that Eric’s office was dark last night. Lynn and I walked past it. (see yesterday's post) Neither he nor Dave was in last night.

This is a set-up. Well, it’s not worth losing a job over.