Saturday, March 08, 2008

iMac Sullied with Posterior-Produced Serum

A couple of weeks ago, at the laundromat, I ran into the wife of the neighbor who isn’t speaking to me. She is extremely sweet, and I would have felt really crushed if she had ignored me, but she didn’t at all. She was perfectly friendly.

After asking if it would be OK to discuss it, I told her where I was coming from when I contacted the landlord, and she said she totally understood, and that her husband tends to get mad easily, but that he usually doesn’t stay angry for very long.

I actually saw him on my next trip to the laundromat, and he didn’t say anything, as nor did I, though I nodded genially. I couldn’t tell what his facial expression was, because I can’t see that far without my glasses on.

This past week was very busy at work. A sibling team has been installing servers with the latest version of the software we administer, and whoever is on call in my group is responsible for checking the servers at night after the upgrades, which requires a huge amount of pre-upgrade preparation.

On Tuesday night, I was still trying to do the pre-upgrade setup at 6:30 p.m. and finally had to go home with it unfinished. It had dawned on me by then that there was no way the post-upgrade procedures, as written, would work in real life, and when I got home, I called a coworker to confirm my suspicions. (“May I ask you a philosophical question?”)

She agreed that the procedures would not work, and said that when it was her turn, she had improvised. I was the second-to-last person to do this task, and I imagine everyone else had had to improvise, too, but hadn’t mentioned it. In the end, I was up until 12:30 a.m. and had to leave much undone, and then my exacting coworker (a different person) screamed at me the next day in a meeting for being so lame. Blech.

Sadder but wiser, I began revised pre-upgrade steps—ones that would allow the actual check to work properly—for Thursday night’s work on Wednesday, and was done by mid-afternoon Thursday. I started work at 7:45 p.m. that night, after the servers had been upgraded, on a laptop connected to my work PC, where all of the tests were set up.

Everything went well until I got a message saying that software was being updated and that my work PC would be rebooted in 45 minutes!

Sometimes you can postpone the reboot, but this was the kind that couldn’t be postponed, so then I was in a panic. I had done all the setup on my work PC and was using the laptop to connect to it. I knew that if the reboot did interrupt my work, my exacting colleague would say I should have set everything up on my laptop, which would have involved schlepping it to work and back, which I don’t like to do.

Rushing like crazy, I managed to finish all of the tasks in time. Fortunately, everything went smoothly. My final notification was sent with 44 seconds to spare.

Then I discovered it was actually my laptop that was rebooting, not my work PC, so I could have just reconnected to my work PC once the laptop was back up, but just as well: Thinking the time was short certainly focused my mind, and I got to bed nearly on time.

I have started to feed Hammett in the tub because when I put his bowl of wet food on the kitchen floor, 50 million ants show up five minutes later. I suppose the same thing will start happening in the tub soon.

Some cute things he has done lately: Stuck his snout so far into my open mouth that I could feel his forehead bumping my teeth. (I could tell he was trying for an olfactory read, so I opened my mouth gapingly to accommodate him.)

Another day, trying to help me with my grooming, he attempted to chew off my thumb nail, which he must have perceived as a hardened piece of crud that didn’t belong there.

One night when I was swabbing the tub out after a shower, he walked into our tiny bathroom, licked the back of one of my ankles, and walked out again.

And here’s an awful thing he does that drives me crazy: He leaps up onto the desk and stands between me and the iMac. Then, and this is the bad part, he casually turns so that his hindquarters are worryingly near the gleaming surface of the monitor. He does this quite frequently, and sometimes mashes his keister, which periodically leaks a foul potion due to a lack of full anal gland expression, against the monitor, leaving a streak! On my iMac!

Once upon a time, I would have said that any cat who smeared unsavory juices on my iMac would be taken back to the SPCA in the next passing cab, but when it’s your own darling boy who licks your ankle, it’s OK.

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