What is this sleep you speak of?

Yes I know, been a bad blogger and going too long between posts.  I didn't have anything particularly witty to write about over the weekend.  I did my usual run and relax routine.  I did help a friend get through their long run an Saturday and then joined them to pick out new running shoes.  I couldn't help offering my input on some shoes to try out.  I think the lady at Fleet Feet might have been a little annoyed with me.  Sorry if I'm a shoe geek.

Anyways the other reason for the gap between posts is because my work week has been a little hectic to say the least.

Monday I get to work and find out some conversion tasks for our testing environment weren't run correctly.  We had a mad scramble to try and fix the issues before testing started at 5pm.  Well we encountered many issues and wound up not getting things fixed until around 7 PM delaying testing.  I had left work while coworkers were sorting out issues and picked things up when I got home.  Once the initial problems were resolved I finally went for a late run. When I get back from my run I find out there is an emergency conference call because more issues.  Argh!  Long story short I stay up until 3AM working on issues until we finally get our batch running somewhat stable.

Tuesday I still manage to make it to the office around 9AM so I'm on 4 hours of sleep, and more chaos had broken out... batch was at a standstill from the prior night so we spent an additional 6 hours troubleshooting before decided to just delete the data giving us trouble and moving on.  We were supposed to run 3 consecutive days of batch and we were already 12 hours behind.  Once again I leave for home an an opportune time and get home to find out there are more issues.  I lend a hand until things are under control before heading out for another late night run.  I get back and find out that all is actually well.  We finally start the day 2 batch about 5 hours behind schedule, but I wind up staying up until 1AM making sure things kick off correctly.

Today I decided to sleep in a little extra since I needed it.  It also helps that I was ordered by my boss to recover since he was going to need me.  I got into the office and find out day 2 went way better than day 1.  The day was spent doing damage control from first 2 days and trying to determine all the issues and their causes.  It doesn't help that I'm the lone all encompassing expert for the data warehouse work being done so all the other various teams kept asking for "just a minute" of my time with various questions.  This adds up when people stop by every 10-15 minutes.

The good news is my boss is buying me lunch on Thursday.  The whole team actually - we're very sleep deprived and many of us have skipped meals to get work done.  We have the rest of this week and next week to work on fixing all of our issues before testing goes into parallel mode, meaning our batch will run daily for 2 months straight.  I really don't want to be working 16 hour days for 2 months so wish me luck.

I'm looking forward to Race to Wrigley this weekend.  It is the site of my first 5K and I want to measure my improvement over last year.  Hopefully I will be a little more well rested by then.