Like it says: no news. That's the latest from work these days. I'm still hanging in there, doing whatever it is that I do these days. So far, that's been everything but sweeping up at the end of the day. Oh... wait. I did that too once. At least I don't have to clean the toilets. Never say never, though. If I tell anyone at work that I had a job in high school cleaning toilets at a transmission shop, I'm sure I'll get picked to do that at the office too. They're always pleased when I tell them I have experience in something. They love the concept of "doing more with less". It's just so sexy these days.

I just wish I knew what it is I was supposed to be "offically" doing -- even if that official word was only good for a couple weeks or something. Lately, I do a little programming, a little fixing customer issues, a little internal IT stuff... and a lot of talking about doing in between any other odd job that pops up. An example is in order.

Yesterday I was the engineer on call up at our data center in Irvine. I didn't know I had to be the on-call that day when I left the house. I got the page midway during my 45 minute commute to work. It's not like I mind driving another 45 minutes to Irvine. (The hour and a half coming back at night isn't so fun though.) But some warning would be nice. I had plans to talk about stuff yesterday. No biggie.

So anyway, I get to Irvine and I'm trying to be productive and get my remote management stuff working in the midst of telling the Ops guys to reboot NT machines and/or restart IIS. (I kinda like playing BOFH sometimes, I admit it.) We're trying to push "one dot oh" of our software out the door. There's really no official version number. We just want to release something so we can show everyone how handy it would be to let the programmers write programs instead of work a broom or do backups. And just when I get some cool bit worked out, I get an email asking me to walk across the street and "look at the condos". (There is a rather large apartment complex -- excuse me, "Executive Suites" -- across from our data center.) That's as much detail as I got. Look at them. So that was enough trying to write code for that day. I could see how this was going to play out. I shut down my editor, closed my compiler and ssh windows, and left nothing but Pine running. This was going to be me squeezing info out of mgmt, via email, in order to put out some fire.

See, I know that our data center people are not liking the fact that we're using an office space for storage. So I think my company wanted me to find a condo in order to store the piles of shit we moved from the La and SD data centers and just threw into this room. Really: there's just this one room with piles of shit in it. Except for a couple cabinets with doors, the rest of it is just stuff we crammed in there since we were in such a hurry. Miles of cable, tons of 1U rails, buckets of screws, that sort of thing. I could just see us hauling that crap over to these fancy apartments. We'd be like the Beverly Hillbillies if they had servers. "Jethro, make sure you git all that there CAT5 and stuff it up agin the closet..."

I went across the street and played like I was a big shot company guy. My story was that we had traveling executive/salemen types that need to show our data center warez early in the morning sometimes and getting up from San Diego was hard in the early morning so we needed executive suites to park them in over night. They actually bought it. I got applications, took a tour, saw the workout room, looked at the pool, all that. I even turned on the kitchen faucet, flushed the toilet and "Ooohed" and "Ahhhed" at the Corian counters when I was touring the "Brushwood" model. Just because I felt like Abraham, my guide, deserved as much. I had to stay in character, after all. I got the docs, brought them back to the colo and wrote up a review of the condos. Word comes 30 minutes later to "rent one... today". Have you ever tried to rent a horribly expensive condo (about two bucks a square foot, in case you were wondering), under a corporate account, when you have no signing authority and don't know any other details, with no money, in two hours? It's that kind of thing that makes my day fun. What the hell, I get paid pretty well, right? I went back over, talked to another rental lady, sent some faxes, got more info, and set everything up. I could write a personal check for $132 and get keys to a fairly nice apartment in my company's name tomorrow by nine am. Spiffy.

But I don't think we'll rent one after all. They told the colo people that we're going to blow $1300 on an apartment to store our junk. I guess the colo guys thought we were crazy. After all, who needs to store things in a high-tech data center? I have to call back Abraham and tell them that the salesmen won't be coming.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and force the development thing. I'm toying with the idea of working from home for an entire week. I think I can bust out my stuff in a week if I really pack it in. Then I can show my ersatz boss that we have a thing everyone will like and that they would be wise to continue funding further development since it'll make everyone's life easier. It's a theory anyway. All I really want is to write software and invent cool stuff. Failing that, I'd just like to know what it is that I'm going to be doing. I'm getting too old to have a mystery job every day. It's wearing on my soul.