Here’s a visual you probably don’t want or need, but I’m going to give it to you anyway.

For about four or five months, I had the happy task of remotely rebooting a PowerSchool server on the east coast at 3:00 AM every weekday morning to address some application stability concerns. Our engineers resolved the problems relatively early on, but the customer still wanted these reboots to happen. Who can say why? Superstition, I guess. For the last three months, at least, these red-eye reboots served no technical purpose whatsoever, and I became increasingly irritated at having to perform this nearly pointless task. At least I pretty much had to be up at that time anyway, to perform my morning ablutions. I usually stumbled into the shower, and then ambled on over to one of my home machines to perform this duty.

Finally, the client decided that months of application stability probably don’t warrant rousting some slob out of bed just to restart a computer, so I was freed from that tedium. Now that it’s over, I think the truth should be told:

Citizens of Acton, Massachusetts! You should know that, over the fateful summer of 2004, the computer acting as the student information system server for your vulnerable children was repeatedly restarted in the morning by a technician, who, often as not, was almost completely nude. He uses a Macintosh computer, is rumored to be trained in speaking a foreign language, is a convicted cynic, and does not always vote Republican. Be on your guard.

There. I ‘m glad the burden of that terrible secret is off my chest. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I have to go and see who these uniformed men are that are kicking my door in.