Julia Slaughter

Posts Tagged ‘upgrade’

In high school I was a prolific writer,I wrote two novel length works that were passed around by my friends. I also wrote countless poems, short stories, etc. I mention this because I felt like in high school I was completely and totally focused on the task at hand – writing. So imagine my surprise when I reconnected with an old friend from high school and I told her she was never going to believe this but I had grown up to be a computer geek. Her response is that she easily believed it. Ouch, I guess I wasn’t as focused as I thought. I mention this because lately my “day job” has been rather time consuming and it’s computer geek related.

For more than a year we have been preparing for an inevitable upgrade, there have been countless conference calls, meetings, and mass emails flying back and forth. The upgrade is made more difficult by the fact that the machine we’re upgrading is a main frame, not a regular PC. When I maintained a Window’s network most of my software upgrades took an hour, maybe two, and that usually included prep time. So today should’ve been the beginning of the down slide, the bulk of the project behind us, (We expected some user hysteria, but that’s all perfectly normal.) but the bulk of the work should’ve been behind us. Did you notice the use of the phrase “should’ve,” well the upgrade didn’t go through as planned and so now everything is in limbo. The upgrade is kind of like a hurricane brewing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s going to make landfall and ruin my weekend eventually the question is when.

At times like this the desire to flee my “day job” is almost overwhelming. I would much rather focus my energy on writing, but when projects like this hang over my head it’s hard to concentrate on anything but that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing other things – watching True Blood, reading what other people are writing, but I just can’t lose myself in my own story the way I wish I could. (Frankly, I’m proud of myself that I’ve been able to keep my once a week blogging thing going.)

Anyway, let us pray that the Upgrade will make landfall soon so that I can weather the storm and get back to doing what I love to do.