The Stuck-Home Syndrome.

Ann’s busy doing catch-up writing.

So to fill the long tea-time of the soul until she can spare some more of her attention for this space, you’re stuck with me for a few more days.

It’s been good having Ann and the kids back home. We’re slowly settling back into our everyday routine, give or take some details: we’re no longer playing ‘beat the dog to the cat food’ and our daughter has taken up reading. We’re slowly working to turn our son to the Literary Side, but it’s slow going. I’m considering tricking him into reading more using comics, but Sandman, Planetary and the Authority are probably not quite right for a nine year old as reading material. He already laughs way too much at cartoon and fantasy violence.

I listened to bagpipes and fiddles on the way to the office this morning, but it just was not the same.

I have come to realize that being the director of IT is a little like flying a plane. When everything runs smoothly, you only get some muttering as background noise, with everyone more or less content and happy to whine about the airport security checks, the food and the other passengers while ignoring how a marvel of technology is currently transporting your backside 30,000 feet in the air.

Then, something goes wrong and you have a lot of screaming, use of air-sickness bags and a hollow void in the pit of your stomach. There also seems to be a lot less air between your backside and the hard, hard ground. Even when the plane levels out again, all you remember about the trip are those twenty seconds of gut wrenching panic…

(I did not post this while Ann was travelling to avoid giving her that visual when she had planes to take. I am not, contrary to some testimony, completely cruel or devoid of a sense of self-preservation. Unlike, say, our cats. Or our son, sometimes. Our cats jump on window screens on the second floor, our son speaks before thinking… but I digress.)

The past couple of weeks have been more or less smooth sai… ah, flying. But there was a moment of turbulence when one of our backups… well, not to get technical, it was lost. Boom. Gone. The tape was no more. Which in and of itself is not a big deal, since we had other backups from a few hours previously… but that was the ONE incident that made its way to the Boss.

Now, the boss, my father, is a brilliant man. He’s built his business from a two room house in downtown Mexico to a five company corporate group in Health care. He’s worked hard, still does, shows no signs of slowing. By his own admission, though, when it comes to computers, he does not understand them nor does he really want to as long as they do their job. That’s where I come in.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing quite as difficult as trying to reassure someone that does not know much about computers that glitches happen, that a missed backup is not a catastrophe. Especially when you have an external auditor-consultant that has the best interests of the company at heart but has all the tact and people skills of a rabid weasel telling him differently.

So, I girded my loins, put on my weasel fighting gloves and mixed my metaphors, then headed into the Boss’ office. A half hour later, I emerged with my team and their salaries intact, a standing order to ride their… backs… like they were wild broncos and I were some sort of… rodeo… type… person… and an admonishment to not let it happen again. All in all, not bad. Oh, and the weas… er, consultant will be conducting regular checkups. Forewarned, forearmed, and so on. I’ll even use my shins if I have to.

Yeah, I’m glad they’re home.

There’s nothing like having someone ready to listen to my weasel-wrestling stories at the end of a long day… or distract me from the hassles of traffic with a ten minute rant on Pokemon’s evolutionary paths.