Bad day

One of those days, out here in the Big Blue, yesterday. I put the morning's nicotine patch in a new place for the first time since starting these little buggers. OMG did it itch for hours! Evidently, you are supposed to rotate the location, which is no fun. The first time an area gets the patch, it itches like a motherfucker. Subsequent patches in the same area are no bother, but I guess that’s a no-no, so those days are over. Evidently, I will spend my mornings trying not to chew off various parts of my body until I can stop taping nicotine to it. Nice.

About 2 hours into the shift, our navigator gets an instant message from his very, very pregnant wife-"I'm on the way to the hospital". He's now gone, but won't be home until tonight, or early tomorrow morning and either way, most likely arriving at the hospital already a father since they were talking emergency C-section. He was such a wreck, the rest of us were freaking out with him. On the plus side, he made me forget about my itchy arm.

Received an email from the office today. It tells me that my future location is no longer in question. I will be working somewhere in the western, or the eastern hemisphere...that rules out the moon, at least. Seriously, it actually just threw a few more options into the mix and while I may not be scaling the pyramids next month, I may be instead, once again hanging with Santa in his back forty-for those of you who've been reading my shit since last September.

Some lowdown motherfucker stole my red stapler. Unless they left the ship with it, I swear by all that’s holy I will rip their head off and shit down their neck. I want to cry.

Finally, for the last half of the shift my job went completely haywire. Nothing worked. All of my work runs on one of those pc cluster supercomputers using a proprietary software package that in effect, takes a bunch of data and runs a series of computer programs on it, making millions, no, at least trillions of mathematical alterations to it. Something was wrong with an alteration, so I fixed it. Which led to another one showing up wrong, so I fixed it, which led to another and another and so on. After an hour or so of this, I realized that I had modified dozens of alterations, but shouldn’t have-something else was changing the alterations. So I went after that in the same method as above (After fixing the dozens of changes above). The problem kept cascading until I had made hundreds of changes, on different levels, in different programs and scripts. Still, nothing working. I put it all back the way it was originally. Six hours to get back to where I started-nothing working. My opposite walks in at shift change and before their first cup of coffee, changes a few numbers here and there and BAM! It all works. Words cannot describe my pain.