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                My boss is no longer allowed to take vacations

Let me say this up front: Smirk is no longer allowed to take vacations, work
related or otherwise.

Early this morning (around 5:00 am) I had to deal with a downed machine in
The Data Center In Charlotte. That involved calling said Data Center (long
distance, because there was an issue with their 800 number [1]) and walk a
technician through running fsck on a corrupted file system.

Then this evening (around 5:00 pm) I had to deal with a downed data center in
The Data Center in Boca Raton (yes, that sounds silly, but if customers who
get their Internet connection through our Data Center In Boca Raton can't get
out to the Internet, and when we can't get in to The Data Center In Boca
Raton from the Internet, then we have to assume the worst—that al-Qaeda took
out the site from orbit, just to make sure). This involved several frantic
calls between Smirk, R (a customer and partner of ours) and Dan the Network
Engineer, and a five minute drive through a thunderstorm (I wasn't worried
about being struck because, as everybody knows, being struck by lightning,
along with getting bit by a radioactive spider [2], being caught in a gamma
radiation blast [3], or getting washed with nuclear waste (Modern Problems)
[4], confers superhero abilities in a person) to find a rather confused UPS
(Uninterruptable Power Supply) on battery mode (with full battery power) but
not supplying power to the devices plugged into it (go figure).

The last time bad things like this happened, Smirk and I were on a business
trip [5], and the only common element between the two times—Smirk was out of
town.

Oh wait … that was in August as well.

Hmm … perhaps August should be cancelled.

Nah, Smirk is not allowed to take vacations.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll-free_telephone_number
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man#Fictional_character_biography
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_(comics)#The_Hulk
[4] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082763/
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/08/22.1

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