Are you kidding me?

So, last Thursday was my crash day; I hit the end of my rope and more or less collapsed. Friday would have been a good day to take things slow, but... no. Instead of methodically working my way through projects, I had a lot of things coming at me; my interruptions had interruptions. That kind of day. 

And by the time I got home I was... overstimulated, overwhelmed, and done. I literally walked in the door, put my pack down, climbed into the bed, and planted my face in the pillow for... an hour and half? Maybe two. 

And then I got a call from work, because some of the forms in our document management system weren't opening, and the document management system is my baby. At eight o'clock. On a Friday night. For a system that we don't have after-hours support for. 

So I rebooted servers, checked disk space and system resources, looked for errors. The first error seemed to indicate that it was a problem with the ODBC connection to the SQL database, but of course by then it was after nine on a Friday and nobody was answering their phones; I finally got somebody to confirm that we hadn't been upgrading our SQL setup or anything that would blow out the ODBC connections, which was reassuring on one level and frustrating on another. 

And then at ten o'clock I got a text from someone else, explaining that none of the documents were opening. It wasn't just the forms anymore; it was everything. And we still don't have after-hours support, and I can't get ahold of anybody at our vendor's office. By then I'd started notifying people higher-up in the IT hierarchy, starting with my boss and the co-worker who also works on this system. I'd also tried a different client and gotten a better, more detailed error that seemed to indicate that the problem was with a particular table in the database.

I swore off it at a quarter to eleven, told the assistant CIO that I'd call our sales rep first thing in the morning and see what it took to get us after-hours support, and that I'd keep everybody posted. Fortunately, we don't have a lot of people in that system on the weekends; unfortunately, the people who are tend to be 9-1-1 operators and the Judge. 

So there I was, on a weekend when I desperately needed to be resting and getting my shit back together, waking up at 7:30 in the morning to call our sales rep directly. Fortunately, she answered. Even more fortunately, she was willing to hook us up with support and bill us later, and by eight o'clock I was back to troubleshooting and probably ten minutes after that we'd determined that yeah, we definitely needed to get the software company on the line. I'd also managed to send follow-up messages to the folks I'd left messages for the night before, saying that never mind, it was something fairly specific and I probably didn't need them unless we had to restore the database from a backup, gods preserve us. 

So it was... 9:45 Saturday morning, I think, by the time we'd fixed the issue and I'd confirmed that things were working again and started notifying people. The issue was in the table that I'd thought it was, and it was basically that we'd hit a maximum number of records within sequel and needed to reset the count. So this issue might conceivably come up again, in a decade or so. Basically, the table tracks document histories: when the document was created, when it was modified, who looked at it, etc. And it was effectively full, so when someone tried to open a document the system would try to write a record of that transaction to this table, and the table would basically reply with, "Phphphphphphphphbt! No room!" 

I'm still going to have deal with the "and bill us later" part of getting support -- the very idea makes me tired -- but the system's up and working again and my weekend is only sort of all shot to hell. 

...Or, at least, that's what I said on Saturday, before we woke up Sunday morning to find that the air conditioner wasn't cooling the house. In Texas. In August. 

I'm so tired. 

Fortunately, we know a guy in our area who's very, very good at such things, and he was able to swing by at noon. Turns out some sort of supplemental component in the outdoor section of the system had quit working, and he was able to replace it on the spot, in less than half an hour -- and for a very reasonable price. And while it took most of the afternoon, the house did get back down to its normal temperature. 

Then the dog ate a plate of bacon I'd prepared as a snack, while I was on the other side of the house sorting school pick-ups and other bits of logistics; but by that point I didn't even care. I just made myself another plate. Dog's gonna dog.

So that's where I am right now. I need to pick up Secondborn from school on Monday and Tuesday, and I'm almost deliriously unfocused. I'm still going to go into work, because there are still several projects I need to get done...

But there may be a day or two this week where I just let a lot of things go to voicemail while I tackle things at my own pace.