Title: Lazy summer days
Colorado is so beautiful in the summertime.
Despite it being almost a hundred degrees outside today (and yes, I was sweating, my Southern heritage notwithstanding), I could have spent the afternoon outdoors. It was clear this morning -- the sky was bluer than blue, and when you looked west, the mountains rose up so clear that it looked like you could reach out and grab a handful of snow off the top.
I love days like today, when you can see the whole rest of the summer stretching out in front of you, and know that fall is right around the corner. It'll only be a couple of more months until it starts cooling off again. That's one great thing about living here: the summers are fairly reasonable and fall comes EARLY, usually in September. In 1993, right before I got to Denver the first time, it snowed on Labor Day. Yeah.
I guess I'm enjoying being out in the daytime after all, huh. It's not all bad. As long as I have cold caffeinated beverages, tunes that I can crank up really high and fast Net access to the outside world, I'm pretty content. Oh, and the fourth requirement for my job: Not Being Screwed With By Management. Yawp. Although this rule may be getting slightly bent: they sent out The E-mail today. The dreaded e-mail to end all e-mails.
Rotational shifts start next week.
This is, of course, my fault. My last night shift was Thursday. The OS group tech who was supposed to be covering my group's ass from here on out, as well as his own work, exploded when he had 17 priority 1 tickets Thursday night. I can't say as I blame him. He is currently "on a project", which is Sun NewSpeak for, "Get me the hell out of here for a couple of months before I up and quit on your dumb asses." The upshot of this is there's no coverage for my old shift; therefore, half the week has no night coverage. We're a 24x7 shop, so this is Not A Good Thing.
So they're putting everyone on nights for a week at a time, rotating everyone through one at a time. Basically that puts a tech on nights once every six months. Everyone at work is bitching and moaning like you wouldn't believe.
Why am I having a hard time feeling sorry for them?
Billy had a good point, though. "Dude," he said to me this afternoon over a Big Dog sub sandwich, "I was on night shift for a year. A fucking YEAR. You were on nights for, like, nine months. We should be exempt from this."
I nodded vigorously. "Hell, I don't mind it. It's just a week. But it's going to be funny as all hell watching these day shifters try to make it the first night they're on rotation. They're going to be a bunch of zombies walking around, like we were the first week we worked nights." We both snickered at the memory.
"Well, it'll be interesting to see how it works out," I commented as we rose from the break room table and dumped our Coke cans in the recycling bin.
Beautiful afternoon for closing a couple of tickets and power-slacking the rest of the day away with a buddy. I like my life.
-- marcie.