Today marked about 8 hours of work. Tomorrow might well be the same, as well as next Saturday, and the Saturday and Sunday after that. Only next Sunday will be free, as i will be seeing Kimmy walk her half-marathon in San Francisco.
So what's happening? Well, i was hired at Visible Path to help build a new datacenter which will host the new version of our product. Things were well planned out, but every available wiggle space on the time axis has been consumed by vendor-caused delays. Thus, the crunch; the only consolation is that we get to go home at night, whereas the actual developers, well, good luck, fellas. I still feel a tad guilty for going to Ecuador at what was one of the worse times, but my boss has waved my concerns off. So far, we're doing well, and we are far from panic. But there's no time for letting up; the product launch date is Oct 30, except that upper management wants stuff live on the 28th.
As a sysadmin, i can't think of a better opportunity than building a datacenter from scratch. You get the chance to set everything up the way you want it, instead of having to put up with cable spaghetti or rack layouts designed by monkeys on Valium or the sinking realization that whoever chose the colocation facility only did it because he was shtupping the salesperson. We have a good team and our eyes, brains, and hands seem to overlap in the right spots. It's a good thing.