It’s 7:30PM on a Wednesday. I’m about to play some video games with my friends. Can’t slouch on my daily duty, though.
I’ll forgo the “Personal News” and just jump into this, because this whole topic is personal news. Today was rough. Let me tell you about it.
As I mentioned recently, Pancakes is in heat again, so sleep is once again strained. It doesn’t seem quite as bad as before, but I still struggled to get up on time to make the drive to work.
Traffic this morning wasn’t as bad as it had been yesterday, but it still took a full hour to get to the office. As has been told to me by a tech writer I admire, “California drivers are powdered crazy. Just add water.” The drizzle of rain this morning was sufficient.
Thus far, things aren’t really that bad. I’m tired, cranky, irritated from the drive, but I’m healthy enough and I made it to work on time. My upset stomach put me in the bathroom earlier than I like, and of course the first stall I went into somehow had shit smeared on the back of the seat, but this isn’t that bad so far, I swear.
I get through some meetings, some of which were intense. One of the meetings goes long, bleeding into my lunch hour, but we accomplished some stuff. It’s fine. Everything is fine. I figure I’ll just go to Chipotle because I lack self-respect and figure that if I already have some stomach issues, how much worse can they be? I’ll get my greasy tacos, take them to my desk, and stuff my face while I catch up on some more work.
They make my tacos and I go to pay and… my card is declined.
“Do you want to use a different card?”
I don’t have a different card. I don’t carry cash anymore. I have plenty of money in the bank. My card should not be declined.
They put my bag of food behind the counter and let me step to the side and call my bank. The call is not quick. I’m on hold for over 20 minutes, with dueling robots interrupting each other to use too-loud voices to tell me things I do not want or need to hear. I heard it all before, the last time an overly sensitive fraud alert stranded me without money.
At least the last time this happened, I wasn’t alone or embarrassed in front of a Chipotle full of people. My stomach twists in knots, and I wait it out.
They’re able to help me. It wasn’t easy. There is some 24-hour pin that I was never actually told, and the account numbers changed, so I don’t have that to give. My social security number is enough to identify me, and the rest of the identification process of verifying personal information and giving numbers from a text message verify my identity.
It takes them 3 tries to unlock my card. Each time, they keep me on the line and I have to weave in through the paying customers to try my card. My face is hot. I’m tired of pressing my cell phone against the side of my head. Just let me get my unhealthy lunch and get back to work.
I get through it and return to my desk, and I have about 10 minutes to down my lunch before the big end-of-scrum meeting, in which I’m supposed to be one of the presenters. I haven’t had a chance to prepare.
That’s okay. My presentation is fine, and the meeting continues. But there’s still that one task I need to complete, so I start working on it during the meeting. It involves updating a row in the production database, in order to change the replication settings for one of our internal environments. No big deal. I’ve done this thousands of times.
Lack of sleep. Upset stomach. Flustered from the lunch experience. Oh, and I left my glasses at my desk, and I’m working on my tiny laptop screen.
I’m not sure which factor played the biggest part, but I screwed up. Instead of changing the replication settings for one of our environments, I changed it for all of the environments.
Oh no.
I didn’t panic. I did what I could to minimize the damage. But I screwed up, and there’s no easy undo to fix this.
I wound up having to stay late, waiting for a restore of a major database so that I can put the settings back. Then I wound my way through crappy traffic to come home, and the restore still isn’t done.
Anyway, how was your day?