Today started out bad. Real bad. First, my back was the worst it has been in months. I was not sure I could work. I was in horrible pain. Second, my wife was acting like she was upset, but she would not talk. I gave her some room and kept my mouth shut during the drive to work (we carpooled today).
I got to work, kissed my wife, said hi to my boss and then realized I did not pack any bottled water with my lunch. I did not want to drink tap water and I only had a soda to drink. I check my secret stash at work and found I had a half liter bottle of water. At least I would be able to drink.
I start my usual daily grind (dispatch tickets, compile and distribute reports, check my work queue, read my e-mail, etc) and then I start on my project that was given to me yesterday and is due in a week. It looks like a lot of typing and manual data entry and I am not looking forward to it. It will take me a week to get all data entered on 400 servers and 500 workstations.
I then remembered I had 2 open tickets from the day before so I looked into them. It seems my TL took some pity on me and installed the drivers for the custom Sun workstations that were the subject of my tickets. I ran our normal build on the Sun's but the customer bought high end cards for them that we did not have in our image. Being new to our department, I was not sure how we handled that, so I left a message for my TL to get back to me. He was kind and downloaded and installed the drivers which allowed me to knock two more tickets out of the way.
The e-mails and phone calls were pouring in and a few hours later I still had not started my project. During that time my TL and one of the old timers to the department got into a heated disagreement over how the project should be completed. I asked if part of it could be scripted and my TL said it could. The old timer said it could, but it would take him some time to figure out all the "ifs" in our environment. I cannot code or write scripts, although I have a general idea of what a script will do when I look into it.
The constant fighting and bickering between my TL and the old timer were getting on my nerves. I already was in pain, now I was stressed. I honestly felt like quitting. I was overwhelmed at the thought of me trying to finish this with these two "helping" me. I almost lost it. It was not pretty. Then I remembered my new inspirational chant/prayer..."Just one more round, Lord." I bowed my head and began to earnestly pray for peace. I did not want the project to go away, but I did want the serenity to finish it properly. I actually did this a couple of times before lunch.
Lunch time arrived and I began to eat at my desk (we have not breakroom and I did not have my truck to go to the park). Shortly after that, my TL comes in with a new list of things he would like me to do pertaining to the project I am doing. I told him I would get to it after lunch. He then said, "You are at lunch? I did not know...sorry." I told him not to worry about it. I tend to work through a lot of lunches.
After lunch, I was too busy with little things to get any of the things he wanted done completed and it was very close to our meeting time. We go to the meeting and we start our round table and when it comes to me, I describe the situation that I find myself in and my boss seems to be concerned. He gets on phone and finds the person who made the scripts that were used in Canada for the same project and asks me if it can be used for my project. OH YES! That little bit of data saved me hours of typing.
My back was really giving me fits before lunch so I took two Tylenol. They really did not seem to help much so at 4 PM I took 2 more. By the time my wife picked me up at 5 PM I was feeling pretty good. The pain was minimal and I was not stressed. My prayers had been answered.
My TL later confided in me that he caught me praying earlier in the day. He is a Christian, but he is very quiet about his faith. Too bad, I think he has a lot to say, but chooses not to. I hope one day that we can have a real good conversation as BiC's.
My wife and I stopped at Jason's Deli for dinner and I had enough leftover to have for lunch tomorrow. We ran a few errand (grocery store and the bank) before we headed home. After we got home and unloaded, I walked our dogs. I really enjoyed it since I was not in very much pain.
I thank God for giving me a few hours of relief. I really needed it. I was stressed and hurting and God knew what I needed. He answered my prayers and provided for me. That is a friend.
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