Ten years ago this week, the shit jumped off. I got paged an hour before my usual start time on a Monday morning asking for all hands to come in because of a problem with the domain. Turns out the infrastructure group had killed the primary domain controller, with no backup – meaning 1400 workstations would need individual visits to reconnect them. We did it in three days, largely through the efforts of my own group, who would still be there at 7 or 8 PM at night when the actual domain admins – who created the situation – rolled out at 5 PM mumbling something about catching a train. Not us, though – we gutted it out, we fought off ridiculous suggestions from uninvolved managers, we engaged in a floor-by-floor clean sweep, and we prevailed. Within two weeks, we also had a massive viral outbreak – and again, floor-by-floor, hand-to-hand combat to clean it up. And before the summer was over, we were at it again, upgrading Lotus Notes in the same fashion: floor by floor and hand-to-hand.
Memory is the great palliative. I remembered those times with a lot more fondness during the nightmarish run at work this spring. I missed having my crew, I missed my gang, I missed shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who got things done, with lunch and the 4Ps and the Mudd House as our rallying points. We were the greatest. In my mind, the summer of 2003 is one big whirl of music from the newly-opened iTunes Music Store and cigars from Courtney’s place and mad dashes to airports and the swagger and confidence of knowing I was damned good at what I did and that any technical conundrum thrown at me could be thwarted.
But looking back and reading the blog posts and email and such, I was plenty miserable enough – enough, in fact, that I was talking about hoping this was my last awful DC summer even before the shit jumped off. I was exasperated with technical limitations, with idiotic upper management, with clueless and obnoxious and antagonistic users, with rival technology units undermining us…basically everything that would happen again ten years later. Technical swag was no match for the unholy trinity of money, politics and bullshit, then or now.
I suppose in the grand scheme of things, it really has been worse this time out, because I don’t have my old gang around me for support and because my physical health and well-being have had ten years to deteriorate. But everything else echoes perfectly. Even my relatives were a problem back then – not to the same extent as in more recent years, but enough to have a deleterious effect on my quality of life. And back then, I always had an escape plan – California. I didn’t know exactly when or how, but I knew that someday soon I would punch out, eject, and my girlfriend and I would escape to Silicon Valley. The West is the best. Get here, we’ll do the rest.
To hear others tell it, I’m apparently worse now than I was then, which isn’t surprising. I’m older, I’m frustrated that the same problem has come around again in exactly the same fashion, I’m feeling my age and thinking about my future, and the Grim Reaper’s always doing pushups in the corner and is, hello, undefeated. I don’t see a long-term future for the job I do now, I don’t know that I want to stick around this employer much longer (not least because the questionable management is going nowhere fast), and I don’t want to have to work until I’m 70. Then again, that’s how long the mortgage runs.
My incredible good luck continued – nine years ago this week, we arrived in California for good. Within a month, we had a place of our own and I had a contract job that would turn into permanent employment within a year. I started to build a new life for myself, and successfully at that. On aggregate, I’ve had a pretty good run on the left coast these past nine years. But when it’s gone shit-shaped, it’s gone all the way.
It’s called life. Best just to get on with it.
And 8 years ago, I also got the hell out of dodge. I realized on Saturday that I’d been here 8 years, you there 9 years, and I’d somehow blocked out the timing of the reports from the underground. Practical upshot is: we’ve both been where we are now longer than we were ever there. Strange to think that.