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.