Wow.
The football season is over, I’ve got a new job, housemates are gone, car has been to the shop again, and the Christmas rush has arrived – and during all this time, I haven’t once taken the 15 minutes necessary to update this enthralling autobiography.
When last we left our intrepid hero (that’d be me), I’d just returned from a wonderful Summer vacation. I returned to Atlanta just in time to begin one of the most stressful periods of my life so far.
For starters, the housemate situation wasn’t working out. My house is big enough for two people who aren’t related or for three people if two of them are intimately involved. As Dennis and Keith weren’t my brothers (and none of us is gay), it was just too much. The older of the two, Keith, is a great guy who has absolutely no sense of personal responsibility. In layman’s terms, that means that he doesn’t pay rent. I’d actually discussed this problem with Dennis before the two of them moved in; but Den assured me that, if Keith didn’t pay, then he (Dennis) would pay for both of them. No problem, right?
Partially true. As expected, Keith was constantly short on cash and Dennis ended up paying for him every month. While this was helpful financially, it also led to hard feelings all around. Keith got annoyed with Dennis for frequently reminding him that he needed to pitch in. Dennis got extremely annoyed with Keith for 1)not paying, and 2)not caring. Throw in some alcohol and the two nearly came to blows one night when I wasn’t home. I got home to find my coffee pot shattered and one of my tubas in a spot where it shouldn’t have been (later learned that Dennis had thrown it at Keith).
The next day, I told Dennis that I need for them to move out. Dennis readily agreed – and he was gone within two days.
Keith didn’t leave, however. Seems that he couldn’t find another place to stay (granted, squatting is a tough sell).
Long story short, I didn’t get rid of Keith until late October, after threatening to put all of his stuff in storage and not pay the storage fee. He is currently squatting at another friend’s house in Dunwoody. I still have his bed. Eventually, I will throw it out if he doesn’t come and get it. For now, however, I have my house back and am once again looking for a renter. I have learned, however….
On top of the roommate situation, I also returned to a new job – that of UNIX administrator for BellSouth Entertainment. Have I mentioned that I don’t speak UNIX? See, the idea was that I’d take this job and keep things rolling as well as I could until I was ultimately hired on to administer Windows machines in AT&T’s U-Verse organization, which will be replacing BEI when we go under next year.
This is not me being negative. It has been established that we’re closing next year. But by getting on the platform side of BEI (the part of the company that actually puts the signal out to customers), I ended up on the U-Verse side of operations on paper. I figured it was just a matter of time until I was officially with U-Verse.
Those of you who’ve gone through large corporate mergers before can probably follow my logic. It was a good plan.
Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell me just how pathetic (read “old”) our existing operations are. Things – important things, like our on-screen program guide – were breaking every day. Our Ad Insertion servers (responsible for embedding advertisements into program streams) are about 10 years old, have no documentation, no redundancy, and are prone to failure – and our president’s stance has been, “I guess if it breaks and you can’t fix it, we’re out of the advertising business.” The Box Drivers (a system that makes sure people who order Pay-Per-View events actually get them) have a tendency to fail at 1:30 every morning.
And, due to my new title, I’m the guy that everything rolls to. I’m supposed to know how to fix it. Talk about on-the-job training!
(For reference purposes, I’m on vacation today. I have been since yesterday. I’ve also been logged in remotely SINCE yesterday, and have already had to fix two program guides and restart our billing services).
But I’m learning, and I can now grep, cron and vi with the best of them. Well….maybe not the best of them, but enough so that I can bullshit my way through a UNIX interview.
I’m also nominating myself for every Windows job posted in our internal career path system. Have only gotten one nibble so far (in Morristown, NJ); but my boss knows that I’m looking and I’ll bolt at the first decent offer.
Football season also added to the stress level this year. For the second year, I was contracted by sports marketing to shoot every game my team played. Don’t get me wrong: I love shooting games. Not having a weekend off, however, gets old really fast. Particularly when you’re getting calls at 1:30 every morning because something’s broken at work. Additionally, my team performed dismally on the field for the first half of the season – this in spite of having what looked like one of the strongest teams in recent memory – and the games weren’t much fun to watch. And my pictures stunk for the most part. I’m chalking that up to old age (my eyes are going), but it still sort of blows to take 700 pictures every week and find that maybe 20 of them are useable.
Did I mention that I’m still with that horrid chruch orchestra and therefore was losing my Sundays as well as my Saturdays?
At any rate, it was a very long season for me and I was rather glad to see it end. It ended in a spectacular fashion, actually. The team rallied from a 1-4 start to finish at 6-5, knocking off two ranked teams in the last three weeks and – as a bonus – taking our biggest rival out of first place in the conference and ultimately out of the playoffs. And after something like 10 straight weeks, I finally got to sleep late last Saturday.
The car. A few weeks ago, it freaked out again. Short story: I dumped another $1,100 into it and it’s running great now. I, however, am broke. Between the car and my job, I’m afraid there will be no Christmas jaunt to Vermont this year. I still have the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off; but there’s no way my boss is going to let me leave town for a week.
Thanksgiving was a rather enjoyable experience, however. Jenny and her parents and I drove up to Greenville to spend the day with Mom, Dad, Greg, Lisa, Larry, Marilyn, Dianne and an assortment of nieces and nephews. Lots of people, lots of food, lots of laughs. Hope everyone had as nice a time as I did.
And now? Well, between putting out fires at work, I spent yesterday doing about 20 loads of laundry, 8 loads of dishes, vacuuming and catching up on other stuff that I’ve need to do for the last three months. Today I’m expecting to do more of the same before heading to rehearsal tonight; and I assume that tomorrow will be the same.
So much for sleeping in.
TWD