Stress and nervous tension

It's year end crunch time at work.

That means the usual round of panics, tantrums and requests for my physical presence in various offices to reassure the powers that be that I actually do some work and that all of the reports, code, database admin stuff that I do day-in, day-out isn't purely imaginary. The major problem this week has been an integration job that my boss ran last week to bring one of the sub-offices into the recurring-invoice system. He managed to miss out a crucial part of the data load and then disappeared off for a weeks skiing holiday, not answering his phone so we couldn't ask him what had happened to the intermediate data files that would have made constructing a fix a whole lot simpler. Sigh.

I went down to the Birmingham office yesterday to try to sort it out, but ended up getting stuck in traffic for four and a half hours, being held up by an accident near Chesterfield and a dog loose on the carriageway near Nottingham. I was pleased to hear that the dog had been rescued by the police, according to the Radio 2 traffic reporter. Not much choice but to remain philosophical and finish listening to my current audiobook - the excellent Engleby by Sebastian Faulkes.

Back home again last night, and I fell asleep on the sofa not long after nine o'clock and eventually dragged myself up to bed at around eleven. Grumph.

In other news, I finished the first chapter of Forumwarz as a level 10 troll, pwning the message board of a nuclear powerstation, causing a catastrophic meltdown and getting instant messages from Kim-Jong-Il :-) Good fun, although some of the forums that you attack by posting spoilers, irritating ascii messages and bad poetry were in spectacularly bad taste (and very funny), including the Konservative Kristian Koalition and Denture Chat. I'm tempted to start a new character as an Emo Kid or a Cam Whore and play it all again.

Oh, and I've got to drive to Birmingham again tomorrow. On a Friday. Oh deep joy.