There’s only been a single night this week that I’ve woken up feeling rested and ready for the day. It was not this morning. As I write this, it’s almost three in the afternoon, and so far it’s been kind of a shitty day. This makes the second weekend in a row where I walk in the door and the day has gone by in such a shitty pace that I was begging people to take the rest of my shift for me. Of course, only fools work in the NOC, it seems. Last weekend, we were one day post-full version push, so it was pretty much expected that the entire weekend was a load of suck. It usually is, because the ninety hours following a full version push are spent helping every engineer chase down bugs and push out patches to the code that we use on the site. This can or cannot be fun, depending on your point of view. From a NOC monkey’s perspective, this generally means you sit and watch as the site goes down around you while engineers shout instructions at you. This, to me, is not as fun as actually lending a geniune hand beyond answering the age old question, “Okay, is it up, yet?”
This weekend has already started out much like last weekend. I got a little surprise coming in the door, though, as the new guy was on shift and looking like Death. He’d been sick all night and made regular phone calls on the big porcelain phone, if you know what I mean. Absolutely not in any condition to work, but he did it anyway, risking infecting the whole office. I’m all for diligence in the workplace, but when your presence risks taking out other people, you have to draw the line there and go home. This is why we have sick leave on our pay checks, for shit’s sake. Instead, he was hovering around me and I was trying not to be a dick, but let’s face facts, I am a dick. I told him to get the fuck away from me if he was sick, plain and simple. He’d screwed up all night so badly that I had to spend the first three hours of my shift cleaning up what he had missed and opening new tickets for issues that were still pending. And now, here in the afternoon, I’m still feeling the aftershocks of the dropped issues. Problem is, I can’t blame him too much for having to combat both an illness and carry out his responsibilities in between all of that. I can’t imagine how I would handle it, but I think I would not risk it and actually go to work. The other side of the coin is that even if he did stay home, there’s no one to cover the shift. One of our guys is on vacation for a week beginning yesterday and ending on the first of the month. This sucks.
I finally got my copy of Sports Night last night, the entire series compiled onto a DVD collection of six discs. Abbie introduced this show to me last year, and to my surprise, it was written by Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin was the writer responsible for A Few Good Men, The American President, and The West Wing. He’s an amazing writer and incredibly good with dialogue, so when I saw Sports Night, I immediately took to it and began investigating the brains behind the comedy. If you have not yet had a chance to watch it, see if you can’t go over to Netflix and watch the first disc, which is available for rent there. You won’t be disappointed. Disc One kept me up four hours past my bedtime last night.
1 comment
I’ve always wondered the same thing when it comes to people coming to work deathly ill. I know that if I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the restroom, it’s going to be my own restroom, at home, where I have a bed 20 feet away, and I don’t care if my Team Supervisor complains, I’m not going to work that sick.
I hope no one there caught it. I know how quickly bugs can go around a workplace.