Choice

Mary Beth and I watched some Kids in the Hall yesterday evening while eating wings. Then we went on a short walk while the air was unseasonably cool. My manager called while we were out. He was offering that I could work from home today, but I figured it would be best to just go in anyway. Things were pretty stressful as stuff on our side was having a lot of issues (due to things not being set up correctly due to switching to a new environment that we didn't have fully set up yet just before). I did do a few dumb things yesterday so maybe he thought I couldn't handle the pressure (I didn't feel pressured in the room, even though I'm not good at talking and all, I just have a tendency to do dumb things regardless). He also wanted a fix we had planned to be implemented that night. So I went back home and started to work on it (this was an idea I had suggested to scrap the database we currently have in the environment and just copy the schema from the dev environment where we've known it works, the create script we'd used had gotten out of date). But then I'm getting to work on it and let the team know and Naveen had already done it so I was just repeating some work anyway! But it was done and it worked! So things went much much smoother today. And then I did/said a few things early on in the meeting today and my manager and head architect both said they were glad I was there, so good decision in going in (it was the last in-office day anyway so it would have maybe just seemed weird going home). Also had a few other people tell me I did a good job. I don't know if it's just 'cuz I rarely speak or 'cuz I did so bad yesterday that they were all talking about it and then I just blew the low bar already set out of the water. Anyway, good to have a good day after a stressful one. Then most of the day they'd moved on to other stuff, more higher level discussions outside my scope, so it moved to being a little on the boring side but that was very welcome after the exact opposite the day before. I was reading as I usually do during my lunch break. And after I got back someone who was sitting next to me leaned over and said, "I can't believe someone in IT is reading real literature" and then we just briefly started in talking about books, pretty much he started to say that's how he met his wife, he saw her reading Look Homeward, Angel and I wanted to talk to him more but we had a "children, you're disrupting the class!" sort of moment and had to stop. Then there wasn't a break and then he had to leave out early to catch his flight back to wherever he's from. But anyway, I enjoyed what little I got from that brief conversation and the "story" (sentence) of how he met his wife. After I got home from work Mary Beth and I went on another short walk. And here you are! Now I'm free and I don't have to go back into the office for the foreseeable future!!