Weekends are usually something I look forward to. I can spend my time however I wish without any planning involved. Well, this weekend just decided it was going to be that nice.
On Friday night, I was to head over to my parent’s house after work so that we could celebrate my sister, Hannah’s, birthday. After getting off work, I called them to make sure things were still going on as planned. I was told that they had to go pick up a cake, but that they’d be back shortly. I figured with the time it’d take me to drive, they’d beat me there without a problem.
Driving there in rush hour traffic took about twice as long as I expected (around an hour). In that time, I managed to get a stomach ache that wouldn’t go away. Finally, when I did show up, no one was home. I let myself in and hopped on my laptop to kill some time. Fifteen minutes went by, then 20, then half an hour. If not for WoW, I probably would’ve left. Mom and I chatted for a bit, I wished my sister a happy birthday, and then headed home for the night.
Why? I had (stupidly?) agreed to drive Hank and Laura to the airport. At 5AM! Maybe I’m just a nice guy. Maybe it was because I was thinking I’d only be up for a short while and then I could go back to bed. Whatever it was, I wasn’t thinking the same thing at 4:30 on Saturday morning when my alarm went off. By the time I was on my way home, I had convinced myself that the only way I was going to cure my bad mood was to get some McDonalds breakfast. I’m never up early enough to get it, so might as well enjoy the grease-bomb stuck between two English muffins they call a Sausage Egg McMuffin.
Really, the rest of the day was uneventful. Painfully uneventful. My roommates were both gone for the day (which means their girlfriends were also gone). So, the computer kept me company for the afternoon, evening, and night. Though, I seem to remember it doing a much better job in days past.
And then I get the call. It’s my boss, Scott. He, the other boss, Neal, and their families have had a cruise planned for a few months now so I figured he was down at the office and wanted to get in touch one last time before they left on Monday. Boy was I wrong. As it turns out, the company we process credit cards through made some changes which they neglected to notify us of. As a result, we weren’t processing any cards, which for us, is like Defcon level 5.
For about 2 hours on Saturday night, I was pouring over code, log files, and email trying to figure out what went wrong. Everything I was seeing told me we weren’t able to connect to the credit card processing server, so I merely was able to wait until they brought the server back up. I figured we wouldn’t do much after 10 on a Saturday and figured the server would probably be back up by morning. What we later discovered was that they had changed their server’s URL and didn’t tell us. Thanks to Jeff’s keen sense, things were running before I even woke up on Sunday.
Sunday really wasn’t that bad of a day. If anything, it was just as boring as Saturday. However, it was quite windy. That dashed any hopes of getting a frisbee golf game in. As I later heard, it was much more serious for others. Mankato saw gusts over 60 mph. A forest fire started and spread rapidly in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. And an oak tree fell through 3 rooms of my boss, Scott’s, house (The picture above is something I found online, it’s not my boss’ real house)! How do you like that 2 days before you go on vacation? Your online business stops processing all transactions for a day and then a tree busts through half your house. I can’t imagine how Scott and his family must be feeling. I do know they left for their cruise, so something must’ve worked out.
Murphy and his law were definitely in full effect this weekend and hopefully he got his fill so he can leave me alone now.
