August 4, 2002 – It’s 2am, fear is gone. Ok, it is 3am and fear has nothing to do with anything right now. The family is back and I can’t sleep which is no major surprise since I slept about 16 hours last night.

Friday was fucked up. First, I woke up after about 7 hours of sleep and felt ok. I went to work and jumped right into a meeting and everything seemed ok. I went to eat pho with a co-worker and everything seemed pretty damned good since, well, I finally was able to eat pho in this hellhole (if you don’t know what pho is, pho queue). I was fat and happy. I went to work and things were ok…no major emergencies like Thursday threw at me. I had to go to Wal-Mart and pick up printer cables and install one of two printers. I go back to my desk and wham! It hits me. I start getting irate…at nothing. I want to just beat the living shit out of my work area over stupid shit like popups. I realize my brain has crapped out and I can’t think straight. Nothing is making sense and I am suddenly very, very tired. Is it the pho? I doubt it since I have eaten much more pho that I did Friday. I had no idea what it was until Saturday it made sense. When I woke up after the 16 hours of sleep, I was groggy like I was in France. There, it was a matter of my brain being on overload. Here, it is often a matter of no REM sleep. When I start to catch up on the lack of REM sleep (which usually results in a long period of sleep), I wake up groggy (Xanax does this as well, but for other reasons). I guess Thursday, the bullshit emergency at work (see below) had me so worked up I fell asleep but never could hit REM sleep. I was little more than laying in bed almost awake.

Saturday, it also occurred to me that I was making stupid errors. I was twisting words around and having thought processes bleed into others. Case in point, someone asked me about a printout of Myers-Briggs personality types. I blathered about it being a “Briggs-Myers list of, um, personality, um…”. Yeah, almost exactly like that. I was out of it. Of course, the person to whom the printout belonged corrected me and I shut up at the risk of sounding dumb. I decided it was best not to even speak unless prompted to at the risk of further foot-in-mouth disease (which occurred again despite precautions).

When I took off today to eat lunch (I was REALLY hungry), I completely forgot my damned study book. I ended up getting a newspaper and started to do the crossword puzzle. It occurred to me then that my brain was STILL half asleep. Simple clues were making no sense. About halfway through the crossword puzzle, I started to hit the clues with more frequency. I felt about 75% of normal – meaning the New York Times puzzle was going to open some whoop-ass so I didn’t even try. I did manage to rip the Commuter puzzle, though. It took some going back over the early stuff and correcting.

Then, I went to do some work at the house. Nothing much other than it was entirely frustrating. I will again make an offer to pay someone to help me out there this week.

About that Thursday emergency…the damned FileNET server, the primary production server at my work, ate the $#!t sandwich out of the blue. There was an email notification about it:

Date: 08/01/2002 1:28:55 PM

Server: NASSCFILE

Status: DOWN (3)

We are so used to seeing these notices from other less relevant servers so everyone essentially ignored it. I didn’t see it until I came back to my desk from some other thing I was working on (I forget now what it was). I immediately ask if anyone had rebooted that server and got some odd looks. Right then, someone comes over to my pod area and indicated they cannot get to that server. Since there are no port errors on the switch, I start to feel it must have blue-screened or something. The FileNET admin is walking to the server room and I am checking the switch JUST IN CASE there are port errors that never showed up on the syslog server. A minute later, I go to the server room and am told the server is, well, doing nothing. No video, no errors, nothing. I pop the top and there is a diagnostic light about the hard drive back plane. So I pop the drives one at a time to see if it will come up. Nothing. I disconnect the backplane. Nothing. At this point, I am sure it is either a mainboard or the RAID controller. Now, if it is the RAID controller, we are fucked. If it is the mainboard, well, we are less fucked but still fucked. My brain is NOT working this day and we are at this point about 60 minutes into downtime. I call IBM and they give me the usual “We’ll be there in four hours”. My boss is not going to go for four hours of downtime and I can’t think. At this point, I am unsure what happened but NO ONE is in the server room and my boss obviously wants something to happen. So, I swap parts to another server and pray the RAID controller keeps it’s config. After some BIOS notices (memory size increase, etc), the FileNET server boots and is up. I get an email indicating 99 minutes of downtime. Everyone seemed happy but I felt like crap. In hindsight, this repair was not major and should have taken me about half the 20 minutes it did to start. I am also pissed the initial 30-40 minutes occurred in which no one (mainly me) noticed the downtime notice. In other words, these 99 minutes of downtime COULD have been more along the lines of 30 minutes. My viewpoint: I caused 69 minutes of downtime because I was being braindead. I am getting sick of not being able to sleep and having this crap happen. It is bad enough I feel embarrassed by making misstatements and simple errors. I hate that is makes me look incompetent.

The only other thing this week is that two different co-workers went to lunch with me on two different days. That is the silver lining, I guess. I could stand for that to happen more often. </rant>