King Size Homer

What a night at work! I was asked to implement some software patches last night on the live system.

This usually involves starting around 16:00 and finishing about 21:30 (backups have to be taken, the system stopped, brought up for patching, patches applied, system brought down and restarted, tests and checks carried out).

I was told that I couldn't start the patching until an email arrived that contains files to be processed by the software that was being patched.

The email is automated and was expected to arrive around 17:15 - but not guaranteed.
Apparently it was not possible to arrange to have a person at the other end send the email through.

I spent 5.5 hours waiting for the email arrived, before the release manager asked me to abandon the work and restart the system.

I had to check the mailbox every 5 minutes or so - I could have really done with King Size Homer's drinking bird to press a 'check mail' button. I ended up devising a shell script loop to do the job for me, which whiled away about 10 minutes or so.

Net result - missed the first episode of the latest Dr Who series for 8 hours of tediom. At least I get paid "ovies" for it - and I caught up with "The Doctor" tonight on BBC3