Let me tell you about my day..

I went into work today. I was tired because it had already been a full week, but today was going to be okay. I would be working with my favorite geeks, doing geek things (moving e-mail over to a new domain, swapping the firewall out--fun stuff like that.)

I knew that there would be a few problems (and there were) but instead of it being just me and a consultant on the phone I had a few allies. This meant that when I remembered we had to change a setting on all the computers (or when in the course of doing stuff we discovered we needed to change a setting on all the computers) I would only have to change settings on *half* the computers-because someone else would deal with the other half.

More than that though, I had someone to eat lunch with, someone to laugh with when things went wrong and someone to prove (to myself at least) that when things went wrong it wasn't all my fault. 70 percent of IT projects fail--according to my IT project management textbook. It also meant that when things didn't go according to plan there was someone with a stronger personality than I have to tell the consultant working off site that "I'll take care of it tomorrow" is not okay all the time.

So even though it was a working Saturday it was going to be a good working Saturday. No Boss-just the geek squad doing geek things and snarking about it.

I mentioned how empty the streets looked-since it was Saturday. "Oh there's going to be a protest about Libya later in the day." one of my colleagues responded.

"What kind of protest? Against Khadaffi? Against Obama? Pro Khadaffi?" He didn't know. We went back to watching the consultant who was remotely connected to the computer we were working on attempt and fail (repeatedly) to sync up Outlook with the new Exchange environment. We offered each other MST3K commentary on how he was doing.

The consultant sorted out what needed to be done and told us about it. Meanwhile another colleague of mine was working in the server room on our domain controller (which is unwell-to put it mildly.) I went in to talk to him and noticed a cockroach the size of my thumb on the floor. In many ways I count myself as a tough girl. Dealing with giant bugs isn't one of them. I screamed and flailed. My colleague in the server room asked for a glass and paper. I provided the glass and two kinds of paper--a wad of paper towels for squashing and a sheet of 90# office paper to slip under the glass. He took the latter, slid it under the glass and handed the glass to me to dispose of the animal. Hmm, I may scream like a girl when I see giant insects but neither of the nerd boys in the room felt like helping me dispose of the creature*. I took it to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

Then we went to lunch and got burritos. We told the remote consultant we'd call him after lunch and watched a video review of a new smart phone while we ate. After lunch I checked facebook. Ted Rall had posted that the US was invading Libya. I walked back to the conference room where my lunch-buddy was and said "I know what the protests are about now." Apparently so did he--since he was reading CNN at the time. "Has the whole world gone mad?" I asked "Maybe?" he answered. It's not polite to discuss politics with coworkers so we didn't say more about it--besides we had 16 user accounts to sync with the new Exchange server, make sure passwords were properly set and share calendars, etc.

As I wandered around doing stuff this afternoon I wondered WTF? What if this is the start of WWIIII? Although I'm a news junkie, I've been very busy lately and there's been an awful lot of news to choose from (Japan, Wisconsin, Fidelity sending more jobs out of state, another piece of the Big Dig falling down, etc.) But this seems like it came out of the blue. I can honestly state that I don't have enough information to know if this is a good idea or not. My inclination is to think it's not.

For starters we've got two wars already-who are they going to get to fight in this one? For another thing most of the people who've been advocating this are people whose opinions I distrust. This doesn't mean it's wrong. But it seems awfully sudden to me.

So I've spent the day in WTF? mode while trying to do my job. I mean on a Saturday while trying to d something big I expect a couple of trip ups--"Oops we have to reset the VPN" "Oops I forgot to export the pst file before moving over to the new server" "Oops I gave you the wrong login info" "Oops I need to call the guy in New Jersey because the server didn't reboot properly" even "Oops there's a cockroach the size of my thumb in the server room" isn't out of the range of expected things that could happen. But "Oops we've invaded Libya?" That is entirely out of scope.

That's how my day went.

*not a slight on either of their characters-just an observation