I… am the Phantom of the Office!

WARNING: This is what happens when I get to watch log files rotate by for four hours straight. You’ve been warned.

While I am not technically in the office right now, I am stuck awake monitoring the status of my application. This being said, I have had a lot of time to reflect on things of Great Awesomeness. Tonight we watched the first two Star Wars prequels and the Clone Wars cartoons in preparations for the release of Episode III. Despite the fact that this viewing was frequently punctuated with trips to my desk to monitor the ongoing support issues that I have been facing, I still got to see most of the films.

I must say, Episodes I and II were not the best things that ever happened. I love the films because they are parts of the whole of the Star Wars Universe, however they really need Episode III to be a capstone to this whole prequel nonesense. George Lucas should really thank Genndy Tartakovsky for saving his franchise… The Clone Wars shorts are better than the first two prequels combined. Part of me hopes that George makes him redo the original trilogy in the same animation style that the Clone Wars were in, then follow with the final three films.

I have spent the last hour listening to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack… Tasha’s really surprised that and myself love this movie and the relating music so much. It doesn’t surprise me at all… the Phantom is the musical embodiment of everyone’s inner nerd. It’s ugly and oftentimes frightening, but there’s usually real genius in there. Its just that no one wants to get too close because everyone’s inner nerd smells like cabbage. Yeah, musicals aren’t the most masculine things in the world, but as far as they go the Phantom soundtrack has some pretty kickass organ music and electric guitars so that makes it OK. Also, there’s a swordfight, and that girl is pretty attractive to boot.

Whenever I think about the Phantom I think about how it feels to describe some awesome technical accomplishment to someone who doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. They give you that blank look, or make fun of you for being such a dork and you really just want them to say “Wow, that was great, you rock.” A whole lifetime of that would probably make me wear masks and run around flourishing my black cape in the cube farm at work. Or perhaps at some family event. Or maybe both.

The only part of this whole ruined weekend that really sucks is that it affects my lovely wife. I love my job and really don’t mind doing what it takes to ensure that no one is troubled by this outage, but the fact that it completely wrecked the only weekened that Tasha will have off to spend with me until July really blows. Also, given my current workload the chances of me getting to flex some of the time back to spend with her are slim to none. This does not help morale around the Dalcher household.

It doesn’t help matters much that I’m going through all this effort so our customers wake up on Monday morning with everything normal. They won’t know that I’ve spent Saturday at the office and most of my Sunday (starting from 8 am this morning until whenever I get done with this shit) reloading this information. No one will call Customer Support and thank them for this thing continuing to run. I will likely get crap for overburdening the servers during this timeframe, but that has yet to bear out. I can’t really claim this on my annual review… I’ll just get “well, that’s what we hired you for, average rating.” Either way, I can be proud that I’ve held up a standard of doing the right thing around here. If I don’t, who will? Definitely not Joe McButtSeat that also gets an average rating for sitting on their butt filling meeting rooms for their wage.

Additional random thought: I would totally grow a Unix Beard if it didn’t irritate Tasha so much. That’d show my superiors. I could then be cool like and briefly Jeff. Maybe we can get to grow one too. Then we could race ‘em.

It’s over now, the Music of the Night!!