5.5.00 - 08:52:17
It's 9:30 AM on a Friday morning and I'm drinking a beer. What could this mean?
A. My presentation yesterday bombed out so badly that I've been drinking non-stop ever since to bury the shame and embarrassment I feel.
B. I spent the last thirty fscking hours battling an evil Phillipino virus writer named Spyder and saving the company from catastrophic fiscal ruin.
C. I don't have a C. I'm too tired from B.
I'm insanely tired. I haven't been this tired since that LAST virus hit the company just about a year ago. The worst part is, I NEVER got to give the presentation! I worried and fretted for nothing! Just how many times am I going to have to be given that lesson before I learn it?
I was up half Wednesday night practicing and worrying, worrying and practicing. I dragged myself, bleary-eyed and trembling into the office Thursday only to be accosted by six people screaming, "A virus! A virus! A virus has struck!"
Well, they didn't say it that way, but you get the idea.
I was immediately surrounded and sucked in by chaos. The kind of chaos that is at once immensely compelling and immeasurably draining. People get so over-emotional and turned on by this sort of thing that the hysteria naturally propagates and feeds on itself like, like, well like a computer virus.
Here's the really funny part. I walked out of the maelstrom thirty hours later thinking to myself, "That was great. That was the most fun I've had at work since, since, well since the last computer virus."
I get to do so many fun things when the shit hits the fan. Let's see . . .
I got to hang in the "War Room" and talk into a Star Trek looking speaker phone and say things when it chirps. Things like, "War Room, Gracie here. What's your status LBN3?" This is especially fun at 3:00 AM when you can really get into pretending you're on the Enterprise or in an episode of The West Wing. (In case you need to know, I was Crusher or C.J. depending on the hallucination at the moment)
I got to eat really good catered food, and a lot of it. This is especially fun because I wasn't stealing it this time and the signs that said, "FOOD IS FOR VIRUS WORKERS ONLY!" meant ME!
I got to put on a serious face, run my hands through my hair and tell six men old enough to my father, "You can't say that to the press, change this copy!" This is especially fun when they look at me and say. "We'll have the revision ready in 10!"
I got to flee from the lab screaming, "The scans didn't work! Turn off the servers now! Turn them off NOW!" This is especially fun when chubby geeks run to do exactly as I command AND some higher up tells the War Room later that I deserve a prize for catching a problem so quickly.
I got to do a lot of fun things, yessiree. But I feel pretty gross right now. I both love and hate the feeling of two beers on top of extreme exhaustion. I sort of feel like super woman, but I also feel like my head is going to explode.
