So I worked yesterday from 0830 to 2030. We've been pretty hectic lately. As of yesterday, we have three OSs in testing, and if you count 32bit and 64bit as seperate streams, thats 6 in test, and then multiply that by the nearly 30 differenet machine models we test on right now and that adds up to a lot of work for us all.
So needless to say, in my capacity as a "real" IBMer as opposed to a contractor, I am not afforded the luxury of an 8 hour day every day, nor am I afforded the luxury of overtime pay. But that's ok. I am not complaining about that at all. I actually do enjoy the work. It's challenging, educational, and the people I work for are very willing to assist me in getting new skills, learning new systems, and getting the education that I want to do better and just expand myself. They are also just plain nice to work for.
Anyway, that is all a digression from the real story. So I was here yesterday until 2030 working on a particularly big PITA of a system and getting some testing set up. I left in the dark and headed on home through the acres upon acres of construction zones that the town of "Our motto is growth and million dollar houses at any cost, but dont fly American flags or paint your house a non-approved color" Cary.
I turned onto what once was a pristine old country road through wide open farmland and discovered what happens when a town overdevelops too quickly in a rural area. Deer. Lots and lots of Deer. At 55 miles per hour a deer makes a really loud crunch. I hit mine at about 40. She darted out of the darkness into the piercing beams of my headlamps, only to collide with the right front passenger side of my car.
She rolled the hood under, shattered my headlight, cornering marker light, popped the bumper free of the right side fender and put a nice crease and dent in that right side fender. I got around her and went on until I could turn around and I did so. Coming back to the scene of the crime I found her lying in the road breathing heavily. Cars were backing up behind her and I thought with heavy dread and with even a minor twinge of excitement that I was going to have to kill the thing with my bare hands.
I exited the car slowly and stealthily, my hands at the ready. My heart pumped with excitement and the thrill of the hunt, a primal instinct from millions of years of evolution hightened my senses. My hair tingled, my ears were sharp, my focus only on my prey. Closer I inched in, like a predator hungry for its prey, stealthily, silently.
After generations of feminization of men, of the eradication of what makes men men, of the turning of men into overly sensitive simpering idiots because women seemed to think that that is how men should be, after all that I became once more the hunter. I was the night. I was death come knocking. I was the glory of Rome, the might of Hercules, the honor of the Spartans. I was the avenger of countless wrecked vehicles. I was the harbinger of doom. I was ...
... foiled. My carnal need for blood, my desires to kill the creature who had suffered at the front end of my German Engineered Missile were thwarted. The deer got to her feet, shakily. She took a few tentative steps and steadied herself.
"Now!" I thought. "Pounce Now! Kill Kill KILL!!!" but I could not. She was standing on her own. Her shaking subsided and she seemed more dazed than mortally injured. She turned and looked at me in the eye, and at that moment I knew. I knew that my foe would live another day, that she would go on into the world, perhaps more wary of the large hard black strips that crisscross the land. More wary of the giant monsters with glowing eyes that tear across the world of her kind. And with that long moment's passing, of our meeting eye to eye and coming finally to an understanding, she took off into the brush, faster than I would have thought possible.
I got back into the little black Audi and headed home.
Today I talked to the insurance company, and got some quotes from body shops. She's an old Audi. An 88 Audi 90 Quattro. She's a good car, but she has the issues that come with age and even if I did have her fixed physically, she would still carry the wounds mechanically that she already has. The slow, terminal cancer eating at her. A leak here, a leak there, a busted bearing, a bad seal. Slowly but surely, she is dying. I may not have been able to put the deer out of her misery, but I will be able to put my poor, beloved Audi out of hers.
Then Jeffy get's a new car. High Five!!
Das Aggregator!