Imagine this week started on a gentle downhill trend towards hell, fire, damnation, fury and madness. Today has seen a steady increase in incline throughout the day followed by free-fall this evening. Better hope my parachute is flame retardant.
We discovered that some code I wrote several years ago had a very small bug in it. That small bug caused one enormous problem. I shall endeavour to explain in layman’s terms… Imagine you have a process that re-fills a filing cabinet with something in the region of twenty thousand files each day. Now imagine the filing cabinet is never getting emptied - and hasn’t done so for the last few years.
Millions upon millions of records. All of it caused by one missing line of programming among tens of thousands. After several hours throwing diagnostic commands at the system, crossing my fingers, and becoming religious, the system seems to be behaving itself once more. The wonders of the internet mean I can sit on the couch at home with this laptop, and watch the status of the various tests I conjure.
You might think I am now happy. You would be wrong. I have to return to London tomorrow - which of course means getting up at 6am, and not getting home until 8pm. Follow that with Thursday and Friday on the adoption preparation course, and I’ll be falling into another weekend where I am too tired to do anything.
The casualties in all the madness are my friends. I have had no time to comment on blogs or write decent emails all week. I hope they understand, and don’t think they have done something to offend me.
I’m writing this while waiting for more tests to run on a server in a data center on the other side of the world. After that I will eat dinner, iron clothes for the morning, and go to bed.
Stop the world. I want to get off.