So this morning I’m on a two-and-a-half-hour-long phone call with a customer site where their end-users are reporting all sorts of weird behavior that nobody else across two continents is reporting. They’re claiming that local database instances are spontaneously losing and -get this- adding records. I’m sifting through their beautifully meticulous backups, going back months, and finding absolutely nothing to support their claims.

As a matter of fact, all their backups are showing the supposedly spontaneous new records, the ones that they say only popped up yesterday, have been there since at least September. The ones that bear all the hallmarks of having been user-entered, because there’s absolutely no code in the application to create new records automatically, much less to, say, give them unique name values that just happen to match exactly the idiosyncratic naming conventions of individual users. For two and a half hours I listened to them say that the program must be buggy, because one of their users teaches math, and he’s sure his numbers are right. Never mind the numerous mathematical mistakes that said genius made in his Excel spreadsheet they forwarded to me, that I corrected and sent back with values that matched the application’s calculations.

Finally, I get off the phone, and it’s time for lunch. I’ve been on a salad jag, and had run out of lettuce at home, so I bought a bag of pre-cut salad mix. Apparently, I missed the label on the bag that must have said either "Contains Minimum 75% Lettuce Spine" or "New! More ASS flavor in every bite!". It was horrible. With the exception of the two actual leaves I found, not even the addition of an avocado could save this lunch, which tasted like a bowl of lawn weeds.

This seems to be an acceleration of the trend begun earlier in the week, when a project I am assigned to, Operation Clusterfuck, finally broke down in a paroxysm of confusion. A critical server I’m supposed to monitor in the wee hours of the morning had somehow been rebooted, and I had never been given any account information to log into the thing. I called Colleague 1, who told me that Colleague 2 had that information. Colleague 2 informed me that, in fact, Colleague 3 was the keeper of this knowledge. Naturally, when Colleague 3 was queried, they flatly stated that Colleague 1 was the man to ask.

Oh, and I found out my roof leaks, so I’m spending a few grand to have that fixed. That’ll be fun, because it’ll take two days, and both bathrooms have enormous skylights in them. Hopefully none of the roofers have a scat fetish, because until I can jury-rig some kind of screen, It’s all gonna have to hang out for the crew to see.

I have an appointment with the dentist today, too.

Sometimes, Lady Luck takes a breather. This wouldn’t be so bad, in and of itself, except that the Fates have all got strap-ons, and are waiting to pounce on you in Luck’s absence and give you a good rogering. Sans lube.

I was minding my own business at my desk yesterday morning, wondering how I was going to bluster my way through another day without anybody noticing I was contributing nothing remotely useful to society, when a colleague asked me about my iPod. This struck me as rather odd, since I don’t own one, and have gone on record as saying I can’t really see any justification for purchasing one.

That’s when I was told that I was, in fact, in imminent receipt of one. One of the new little 1GB iPods that has generated so much recent press and so many knowing nods amongst the cognoscenti, the gadget-happy, and the stark raving Mac fanatics. We were all going to get one. Free, gratis. The mothership was showering the nifty widgets upon all its worker drones who so ceaselessly contribute to the collective.

You know, I may just be starting to like this place all of a sudden.

Is this stuff made from freshly-squeezed pimps, or is it from concentrate? Either way, I don’t think I want any in my mouth.

Actually, I’m sure of that.

It all started innocently enough. I had, apparently, regrettably displayed a burst of efficiency and competence at my workplace, and it had not gone unnoticed by my corporate masters. Since, as it is said, no good deed goes unpunished, I soon found myself appointed as the responsible party for all the CESAs in Wisconsin. (In a nutshell, the CESA organizations provide technical support to schools. Now it was my job to support all of them.) In a trice, I was made Wisconsin’s bitch.

It wasn’t long before the Cheeseheads started running my work life. They are nice enough folks out there, but before long, I was buried under so many requests from Wisconsin, I had less and less time to perform any of the routine engineering tasks expected of me. One day, to display my exasperation, I made my iChat status message read "CESA Slave". A colleague suggested that I get a BDSM-style icon to reinforce the concept of servitude. Apparently she’s a perfectionist, at least in matters of the slave/master dynamic. I didn’t pursue that line of inquiry any further, but instead went out and found a serviceable image.

Now, arguably, the most popular leather-slave image comes from Pulp Fiction’s "Gimp" character. Someone started bandying it about, after noticing my chat avatar, and the name quickly spread and stuck. So now I’m known in the office as the Gimp. Gimp life turned out not to be as bad as one would expect. I even learned to laugh at it, and others with similar burdens identified with it as well. Soon little gimps started popping up all over our IM buddy lists. After all, as long as you know where the next lash is coming from, you don’t fear the whip as much. I even made a small stable of holiday-themed Gimp icons to show my proper Gimpy spirit all year long. Life was OK.

Until, that is, my fame as Wisconsin’s bitch apparently leaked out to our sales staff, and my name—and personal desk phone number—started getting whored out to other clients. Most of them were other Wisconsin sites, but then it really started getting out of hand. I started getting calls from people I’d never heard of, from all over the Midwest. I wasn’t just the CESA Gimp anymore, even though I pointedly ignored as many of the unsolicited requests for help as I could. Even the most subservient ball-gagged submissive can only service the simultaneous demands of a finite number of masters. I was getting passed around like Paris Hilton at an amateur video convention.

I am now… an Interstate Gimp.

Good Lord, it’s 2005 already, and I haven’t finished my story, which now seems completely boring, and I’m not really sure why the heck I started it in the first place.

Suffice it to say, however, that a good time was had by all. I also cannot resist further rubbing your nose in the nice weather down there; we ate outside in the early afternoon sun before retiring at dusk to the indoors of the ancestral home and its cheerfully roaring fire. It was all very nice, and I won’t bore you with the details, in the spirit of Christmas peace towards all.

Happily, this Christmas has had two lasting, positive impacts. The first was that I was able to sell one of my brothers-in-law on a new iBook to replace his 7-year-old (!) Windows laptop. Welcome to the cult, my brother. It is with unabashed glee that I contemplate the horror this will inflict on my other brother-in-law, a hardcore Linux CLI geek, whose utter disdain for anything not scratch-built and completely open-source has caused me to roll many a jaundiced eye when he launches into one of his stock polemics about the virtues of running a 12-year-old beta test of an operating system.

The second was a happy accidental discovery that I am glad to share with all and sundry. I found that caramel cream liqueur is absolutely sensational in eggnog. It’s way, way better than brandy could ever hope to be. Anybody who still prefers a "splash" of brandy after drinking this mixture is really only drinking it to mask their thirst for the hard stuff. For those people, please stop the charade and just grab a snifter, already. You’re depriving others of the precious, precious nog. If you’ve still got some eggnog around the house, try it. If not, just wait ’til next year. I guarantee happy results.

God help me, but I just wrote a paper on major database management systems that was complete crap. I know it’s crap. I just can’t bring myself to care. I pinched out a loaf of mediocrity. With my name on it. I still don’t care.

I don’t know which is more awful, the fact that I deliberately wrote a paper so gravid with apathy that the whitespace around the words appears leaden gray, or the strong possibility that I’ll get a good mark for it anyhow, meaning that the degree I’m earning is worth that much less in terms of actual effort.