From the blog at staggerlee.org, June 12, 1999:
I wasn’t supposed to go into work yesterday. I was going to take the day off for just the reasons you can read below. I asked to have that day off about three weeks ago because work is getting more stressful all the time and I needed a little time to myself, especially since I was almost guaranteed to be depressed all week. Sure enough, this was as rough a week as we’ve had in a while–they insist on treating our team as the red-headed stepchildren. They ignore us, act like our advice and opinion is worthless–and then things turn out exactly like we warned them and then they almost act as if it’s our fault. I was VERY glad I wasn’t going to be in on Friday.
Then Thursday about 5:45 I got a call from Priit Vesilind, our number-one gun. Senior writer, close friend of Bob Ballard, the man who goes where the action is for the National G. He’s off to Albania and assorted places and bought a new laptop and wanted to know if I could set him up for AOL dial-up from Europe on it. I said sure, I can do that, I’ll just set it up Friday.
Well, I figured I’d come in on Friday and it’d take a half-hour and I could slip out. Ha. It’s a Micron PC laptop and it had hardware problems. I’m a Mac software guy. This contraption is the exact opposite of what I was hired to work with. But a promise is a promise, so I started in on it.
I didn’t get away from work until 7 PM. On my day off, I spent over nine hours in the office getting the thing to work. And ultimately I did, with the help of another guy and a couple of phone calls. Priit had a laptop that would do nothing at 10 AM and at 7, he had one that would dial in and get his mail from Rome, Athens or Zurich.
And I thought about all the times I heard someone getting up at 2 AM to go shovel coal into the furnace at Fultondale Elementary, and I didn’t think anymore about the leave I wasted or the time to myself I didn’t get. I thought that I had done a great job that I–and others–could be proud of.
That kind of week this week. Instead of being at WWDC, I’m covering for the folks who are. Aggravated by a left knee that’s worse now than it was before the surgery, and made worse by a sudden crisis project that came about specifically because somebody chose to ignore me rather than deal with the problem I warned them about. Leaving me holding the bag with a very tricky needle to thread technically and politically.
And yet.
Tomorrow I’m going into my weekly meeting with everything topped up, all projects done or documented, and a sheaf of grateful emails from people I bailed out at 6 PM. Some days, it’s just your day to shovel coal. And I’m never prouder – and I know some others who are probably the same – than when I go home late, grinning through the exhaustion, because I know that shit got shovelled.
And so I will close, as I did a decade ago, with the same toast…to absent friends.