I had a shocking nights sleep, kept waking up every few hours, 2am, 4am, 5.30am.

I woke up at 6.35am exactly again, waited for the radio to come on. The volume had been turned right down, so I got up, turned it up, and went back to bed.

I ended up getting up a bit after 7am, after listening to the news, went and had a shower, got ready, had some breakfast, and we left to go to work at about 7.40am.

I searched the back seat of the car, when I jumped in, from the front seat, but couldn't see it, or feel it down the back of the seat.

We went the long way to work, so the car would warm up a bit. On the way, the senior DBA was telling me how the mail room woman was fed up with the CCB guy staying at her place, because he doesn't pay rent etc, and wanted to know if the senior DBA would give him a room in the place behind the pub when he gets it.

We got to work, and I searched more thoroughly through the back seat when I got to work, no sign of my pen down the back of the seat.

I looked carefully on the way into the building, not near any of the security doors, not at my desk, under the chair or anything. Damn.

I figured I'd call the service station and ask if they've seen it, it might be under the counter or something. I had to find their phone number.. oh, it'll be on the reciept for the juice I got yesterday.. which I threw away in the contract DBA's bin yesterday.

I don't recall my pen being in my pocket at that point either, so I must have lost it at the service station, or in the building on my way in, damn.

I eventually managed to find the phone number for the service station, called it, but there was no answer. Oh well, it must be gone this time.

I started doing some work, and a little while later got a call from someone in webservices again, about the stupid website. I looked, mysql was still running. Hmm. I tried to view the site, got nothing, and found that localhost had been blocked from connecting to mysql again. Argh.

I unblocked it, and the site was available again. I really need to write that script to look after restarting mysql and unblocking the connections, and save me doing it twice a day.

The woman who looked after the old system came around with a diagram of the new system, and the changes we might make, and started talking at me. I'm not in the meeting yet, I'm thinking about other stuff.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he'd spoken to the mail room woman about the CCB guy, and not wanting to give him a room, if he doesn't pay rent, and he told me that apparently the CCB guy had gone away for a week, and figured that he didn't have to pay rent that week because he wasn't there (but all his junk was), and he doesn't do anything but lie around watching tv.

Apparently the mail room woman had got the mower out, couldn't start it, had to ask him to start it for her, which he grudgingly did, and then just went back and lay on the lounge again.

I got off the phone, and waited to go into the 3 hour meeting I got the email about yesterday.

I went into the meeting, and we sat and I went through what I was working on at the moment, the new table structure etc.

We went on to speak about the changes we want to make to the scope of the project, getting rid of some major parts I still had to write, but instead of making the project easier, they've been replaced with new functionality I'll have to work out the logistics of, and then write.

It ended up taking over 2 1/2 hours, and then when we came out, after 12pm, I just wanted to go for lunch.

I went up and saw the senior DBA, and arranged to go to lunch, he was getting the helpdesk to create some tickets, to cover the work we've been involved in the last few days, including the stupid website falling down constantly.

The chick who drove us last night came around to go to lunch, got fed up with waiting, and left, saying we could catch up to her.

We went out to lunch, on the way down, the senior DBAs phone rang, it was someone from the temping agency he used to go through, trying to sort out the timesheet he missed in November, when they stuffed up, and lost a whole bunch of timesheets.

We kept going, and then the senior DBA called the chick from before, and she was just in the Reject Shop we'd just walked past, so we stopped, and she came out, but told us that she was with the annoying support guy at the moment, and had to go back to work anyway, so we kept going.

We bumped into the contract DBA having lunch, so we spoke to him for nearly 20 minutes, about the infrastructure changes that Orange are going to make, and screw everything up. They want to consolidate all the servers into a single big iron server, running multiple virtual machines on it, thinking they're going to save money on Oracle licenses, not thinking about the fact that you have to pay for Oracle licenses in regards to how many CPUs or virtual CPUs (whichever is greater) there are in a machine, regardless of how many the Oracle instance is running on.

We also spoke about the other project, that they've blown out to a huge task, instead of a few weeks work for the senior DBA and myself.

We kept going, went into the shopping centre, and I got a kebab for lunch, not in the mood for pies today.

We sat outside, chatted, more about the stupid stuff they're doing at work, and then we eventually wandered back to work.

I got back to work, and the new guy was trying to work on making some changes to the development version of one of our production systems, so I sat and got him setup to do that.

I came back to my desk, and I continued working on getting the new tables into production.

A guy from some other group came around, and was talking to the woman who looked after the old system, trying to find why he couldn't find a specific report, she wasted a bit of time looking, both in the web interface, and in the (wrong) tables, and couldn't work it out.

They called me over, I scratched my head for a bit, went back and did some queries, and found it was because of a broken join. For some reason a single id was missing, the foreign key in a separate table, so once I added that id into the table, the report showed up. Weird.

How the hell do people keep finding these things? out of about 120 000 records, one has a broken join, and they find it. Why don't these people buy lottery tickets?

The senior DBA called me, and told me he was leaving, I said I'd probably do another hour or so, and catch up with him later.

My manager came back from somewhere, came out to speak to some of the group, saying he had an important thing to discuss with them.. who was going ten pin bowling tonight. They chatted for a bit, and eventually asked me how I can bowl, if I can bowl 200 etc, and I said I didn't think so, I'm lucky to do 100, but then that was the end of that, I wasn't actually invited.

The bit about the "something important to talk to you about" reminded me of something though, the fact that I wanted to speak to my manager about the project I'd seen the functional spec for, that I'd been talking to the DBAs and the syadmin about at lunch.

I went in, and had a discussion, saying that I thought he was going about things the wrong way, in regards to what should be a couple of weeks work for myself and the senior DBA.

I ended up in there for about 45 minutes chatting to him about it. Basically he knows it's a waste of money and time doing it this way, but it's because of the Orange takeover, he wants the consultants in good with them, so he can get them to do the design on the next major project.

The next one relies on this small one being finished in a little while, and basically he knows I'm too busy to do it, so he's happy to waste the money on a small project, which he knows will take 3 times as long as it should.

Oh well. I came back to my desk, and kept doing some testing in development.

While I'd been in the office, a couple of times my phone had tried to receive a message, but was full. This reminded me to put my phone on charge, so I deleted a message, and plugged it into the charger.

I got a call from the manager in royalty, telling me that he was having a dinner thing tomorrow night, and had been rude, and not invited me. Ahh.. this is the dinner that the senior DBA was talking about when we got to the bottlo last night, asking me how I got out of it.

I told him that I wasn't sure if I was free tomorrow night (which is true), because I was thinking about going to see HHGTTG at the movies tomorrow night. He told me that there was a preview showing tonight, found something, and started reading it to me, about a charity preview showing tonight, wine and nibblies at 6.15pm, and the movie starting at 7pm.. if I've bought a ticket by last Thursday.

Hmm, there goes that then. I said I'd think about it, and he asked me to let him know in the morning, because he had to go and get the groceries.

I got off the phone, and went back to programming, once I was happy that the code was working in development, I updated the internal production server, which doubles as testing.

I asked the woman who used to look after the old system to do some tests, and a few minutes later, she found a bug. I don't know why it didn't show up in development, it was very weird. Basically, I was doing a case conversion on a variable at the wrong point, which was then breaking a string comparison. As soon as I removed the case conversion line (1 line), it all started working.

I eventually got that SMS, from the temping agency, whinging at me for not putting my timesheets in, and to have them in by 4pm today. Oops, it's now about 4.40pm. I finished off last weeks timesheet, and went to get them signed, but my manager had disappeared again.

A little while later, I got a call from the sysadmin. The website was down again. I checked it, mysql was still running.. but localhost was blocked again. "I'm sick of this, I need to write that watchdog script", I thought, so I started on that.

I got most of the way through that, and then I got an email, the woman from the mail room, sending around dumb jokes, funny, but groaners.

I did a google for some jokes, and started replying, that wasted about 1/2 hour.

I went back to working on the script again, and then the syadmin called me, telling me that he wanted to leave, I said I had about another 15 minutes of work to do, he said he'd park his car in the secure carpark, and then come back up.

My manager came back, so I got him to sign my timesheets, and then I went to fax them. The stupid fax machine wouldn't work properly, it dialled, and tried to send the fax once, and then just sat there. I tried to send it again, but it did the same thing.

There was a fax for the royalty group upstairs that had come in, so I took that, planning to take it up to them.

I went to the other fax machine, the one that's a scanner and photocopier etc, the sysadmin had come back, and I sent it from there, it took ages to go through.

Once it was sent, I grabbed my stuff off my desk, and went up and gave the fax from downstairs to the cranky old guy in royalty.

I went back down, (the sysadmin had waited downstairs, because he hurt his knee a few days ago), and then we left, and walked down the street to the pub.

He went in where he was staying, I said I was just going to drop some stuff off in my room (in the other pub), and I'd be back in about 10 minutes.

I went over, dropped the stuff in the room, and then walked back. As I was walking to the other pub, I bumped into the guy from CCB, we went into the pub. I ordered a drink, the guy from CCB disappeared, or I would have shouted him one.

I got some change for the pokies, went in, wasted a couple of dollars. The guy from CCB came through there, and said everyone was out the back, so I went out there.

There was a few people there, the old librarian, the support guy who's been in Orange, the guy from CCB, and the senior DBA.

I sat with them for a little while, and finished my drink. I didn't have much cash left, so I went to the ATM, and pulled out some money.

I thought I got ripped off by the ATM, since not all my money had come out. I looked up the slot where the money comes out, and a $20 note was stuck half up the slot, because the corner was folded over. That's bad design, I pulled it out, checked I had all my money, and went back out the back.

I gave the senior DBA half the money for the room this week, in front of the guy from CCB, who owes the senior DBA a few hundred dollars, that he borrowed months ago, and the senior DBA has been whinging about.

He took the chance, and he told the guy from CCB that he owed him some money, and while they had a discussion about it, I went to get another drink, wasting more money in the pokies on the way back to the bar.

I got another drink, and the bartender started chatting to me, asking where we all worked, and stuff like that, at which point the sysadmin came downstairs, ordered a lemonade.

I didn't tell him we were all sitting out the back, figuring the bartender wouldn't go on much longer, and we'd just go out the back.

But the bartender kept going on telling me how he worked in the Newcastle Workers Club, before and after the earthquake hit, and it got massively damaged, with a few people dying.

He was telling me that after it was fixed, a whole bunch of stuff wouldn't go upstairs, or wouldn't go alone. He didn't know what they were on about, until he went up there one night, and the chairs were moving around by themselves, and he nearly shit himself.

The sysadmin had been sitting watching the news or something, not listening to our conversation, he got up and wandered off, looking out the back I presumed.

Apparently one of the people killed was an old woman, and while the building was shaking, she'd dropped her glasses, and was looking under the tables trying to find them, when some of the building collapsed and she was killed, so they suspect that she's up their haunting, looking for her glasses.

I chatted to the guy a bit longer, and then some guy came in to sort out a bill or something, so I said I'd chat to him later, and I went back out the back.

There was still only 4 of us out here now, even though the sysadmin had come out here. The guy from CCB had disappeared, seems like he's done his trick from last night again.

We sat and chatted a bit more, and then the librarian went home, and we decided to go and get some dinner.

The support guy who's been in Orange went down to the other pub where we were going for dinner, he wanted another drink, and didn't want to wait around.

I waited with the sysadmin, while he finished his lemonade, and the senior DBA went back to the other pub to get something.

When the sysadmin finished his drink, he and I went and sat on the bench out the front of Radio Rentals, watching the tv through the window.

The senior DBA turned up a few minutes later, and we all walked down to the pub, the Grand Junction.

We went in, there was far too many people in here for my liking. I went to order a drink, realised it was Toss The Boss, and decided to get a beer, since I had a chance of getting it for free. I didn't. Now I had a beer I didn't really want, and had to pay for.

We found the support guy, went over, chatted there for a minute, and then went and sat in the beer garden.

The guy from CCB called the senior DBA, and asked where we were, and he told him. He came down a little while later, and gave the senior DBA the money he owed him.

We chatted for ages, it was now about 7.25pm, so I said I was going to go and talk to the guy in the restaurant, because sometimes they close early if it's quiet.

I went in, spoke to the guy, he said he was still on for another hour, I took the menus, and went back out the back, and worked out what I wanted for dinner.

I didn't really want anything to be honest, I'm so sick to death of all this pub food, but I have to eat something. I eventually decided to just get a cheeseburger, only $4.50, that can't be too much food.

I went in to order, along with the syadmin and the guy from CCB. When I got back into the restaurant, all the geosurvey group (that I work in) where there, having just got back from ten pin bowling.

My manager was there, and the project manager, the new guy, one of the indexers, the woman who used to admin the old system, and another guy, who I'm not sure what group he works in.

I ordered my meal, and the others I was with ordered theirs, and then he started taking orders from the geosurvey group.

I went back out the back, and told the senior DBA they were all there, because he can't deal with them, so I ended up going back in to order his meal. When I was in there doing that, the guy behind the counter was shtting himself, he couldn't handle making meals for like 10 people, he was thinking he was going to have an early night, so he had to call in the woman who usually works there.

I ordered the other meal (only a sausage sandwich, $3.50, cheap as), and then went back out the back.

We saw the woman turn up, and go in the kitchen, not looking too impressed at being called into work on her night off.

It was about an hour before our food was served, I hadn't even noticed though, we'd just been chatting.

When we were finished, the others went inside the pub, and just left the sysadmin and I outside, the woman came and collected the plates, and we said we were sorry for having her come in on her night off, but that it wasn't really our fault, because we'd only ordered burgers and sandwiches and stuff, it was geosurvey's fault, for ordering steaks, and mixed grills etc.

I sat and chatted with the sysadmin for a while, and eventually the others came back out, and then the new guy came out and sat with us.

We sat there chatting, and joking and laughing for ages, eventually the new guy said he was leaving, just after 11pm. I was tired too, so both the sysadmin and I took the excuse, and the 3 of us left, leaving the senior DBA and the support guy in the pub.

We walked back, the new guy lives only 100m or so from the pub, and then the sysadmin and I walked back to the pubs we were staying at.

I went back to the room, and went to bed, it was nearly midnight.