At Least I Have My Health

My suspicions were correct: I got e-mails this morning letting me know that both positions have been filled.

:::sigh:::

Obviously there's a reason for this somewhere. (Although I must admit, my faith in "there's a reason for this" has never really recovered from the debacle of October 1995.) But honestly? Just at the moment I don't care what the reason is--I just care that it sucks, mainly because it means a) I'm stuck here for the moment, and b) I have to go through the interview bullshit mill again for the next job.

It does not help me, not even a little bit, that today has been probably the most stressful day at work in months. We were given notice on Friday that it might be a good idea to take the servers offline for the weekend, since we were getting lots of hacker activity. So I took our servers offline and went home. I got here at 7:15 this morning intending to have everything up and running by the time everyone got here. I went to the database server and started it up with no trouble; then I went to the main file-sharing server and hit the power button.

And....nothing.

Hit the power button again.

Aaaaaand....nothing.

Swapped out the power cords. Nada. Switched to a different outlet. Not a click, not a whirr, not a ping. Dead like alternative.

Did I mention that this was the MAIN FILE SERVER? No? Well, it was. Is. Whatever.

Pause for panic.

I called the main department and asked them if they happened to have a spare G4 power supply laying around. Of course, the main department had MUCH bigger fish to fry--unlike us, the hackers actually DID compromise three of their servers--so even though we weren't exactly far down on the priority list, we were the thing that was LEAST on fire at the time. And all morning long, from 7:30 til about noon when the main department tech suddenly showed up unannounced with a whole new machine and swapped the old drive into it, it was "Gladys, when are we gonna be back online?" "Gladys, have you heard anything?" "Gladys?" "Gladys??" "Gladys???"

I felt like the mother of three-year-old octuplets in a grocery store.

And I owe the main tech guys from the department a MAJOR lasagna for their last-minute rescue misson.

If anyone's got a spare time-machine laying around, I'd like to go into the future far enough to see that eventually this WILL come to an end, that eventually I WILL get another job, that everything WILL work out and I won't be working here til I'm 80 years old and bitter, going home every night to a house full of cats. Because that's sorta how it seems right now, and I'm not enjoying that feeling much at all.