I got up, and got ready, had breakfast.

I had to go back in room, there were far too many people in the pub. What are all these people doing in my house?

I didn't think that last night was particularly busy either.

I packed my stuff, and then we left the pub, for another weekend, before we're back in again on Monday.

I senior DBA had parked his car over at the back of the carpark, near the road works going on, and when we got over there, the workers asked if we could hurry up and move the car, because they were trying to do some work.

We loaded our bags, and drove to work, I went in, and went to my desk. I'd just got to my desk, when I noticed my phone reboot.

Oh here we go, has the power stuffed up again? I went up to the computer room, and found that everything looked ok, the UPS were all online, but it looked like a few of the servers had rebooted, including the big IBM multiVM machine thing, which had hung while booting the kernel.

I couldn't get into any of the servers, since the domain admin account had been locked out again, and all the other servers, the email support guy had logged into, assumedly yesterday after everything rebooted, and locked them.

I got really annoyed, so I went for a walk, across the road, and got some juice, and then I went back to the building. I went to see who was in the IT area, no one really, so there was nothing we could do about servers.

I sat with the senior DBA for a bit, and did some work on a script he was trying to get working, for archiving data off to tape. We were having problems, when trying to move files into directories that didn't exist, and had to find a way to create the directory before moving the file.

The senior DBA wanted to just recursively copy all the files, which would create the directories, and then delete the originals, but I didn't like this idea, it's going to require twice as much space, and if it breaks, we have to start all over again.

I tried to find a way to get the path from a filename, using awk or something, but I need to be able to cut from the end of the string, and I can't find how to do that.

The little guy in royalty was being really annoying, he'd found 4 rulers, and stickytaped them all together, to make about a 1 metre ruler, and had slipped it under the partition, and was waving it back and forth, hitting our feet.

I stepped on it, and then used my foot to drag it out of his hand, under the partition.

I then told him that if he continued to annoy me, he would regret it. A minute or so later a soft rubber ball came over the partition, and hit me in the head. I was very close to going over there and dealing with it, but I was too busy trying to work out what I was doing.

The little guy came around, and asked for the rulers back. I told the little guy that the rulers had been confiscated, and he'd get them back at the end of school (taking the chance to bag him out about looking young).

He then tried to argue, that they weren't all his rulers, he'd taken them off other people's desks in royalty, and I told him that he should have thought about that before, and that it wasn't my problem, he'd have to explain to the other people in his group where their rulers had gone.

He gave up, and went back around to his desk. I pulled the 4 rulers apart again, and hid them in the cupboard, on top of the Oracle books.

I gave up trying to get any work done up here, and told the senior DBA I'd work on it downstairs, where I could get something done.

I went back to my desk, and kept working on it, I found a perl function to reverse the order of a string, and then I was able to use cut on it, to cut the last bit of the string off, the file, and then reverse it again, ie back to the correct way.

The senior DBA called me, and told me he was about just do it the long way, and I told him to wait 5 minutes, while I finished on the script.

I finished it up, did a test run, and found that it worked, but wasn't efficient, because files that we were trying to archive had been deleted already, so it was wasting time.

I then put a few more checks in there, to make sure the file still existed, and then I updated it on the server, and sent an email to the senior DBA, that he could run it.

I then got on to working on the stuff I'd been doing last night again, and sorted out the busted insert function stuff I'd done yesterday.

I got a call from the senior DBA, telling me that they were planning to go out to lunch, because the South African support guy is in for his last day today. I told him I was just in the middle of writing an email, and would be up there in a couple of minutes.

I finished writing the email, and sent it, and then I went upstairs, and found that there was no one there. Thanks for waiting guys.

I then left the building, and walked down the road, with the South African support guy, and a couple of others, and went to the pub.

We all lined up at the bar, waiting to get drinks. The senior DBA came from the ATM, pushed in, and then wasted time, having the bartender check if we were booked in for the room next week.

Gees, I'm trying to get a beer here. Eventually the bartender finished up, and I got served, and I got my beer.

We went to the restaurant section after that, and ordered lunches, and then we went and sat out the back, on the back verandah.

The food was served a little while later, and we sat and ate, and then stayed there for ages chatting.

The so called "Analyst Programmer" left, to go and get a haircut or something, and left his phone behind.

A while after that, after we'd been there for over an hour, the email support guy turned up, and had ordered food. We sat and waited even longer, and then once he had his food, and was about halfway through it, some of us left, because we'd been away from work for almost 2 hours.

On the way out of the pub, we bumped into the manager of royalty, who had only just managed to get there. He decided to just get some lunch somewhere else.

We walked back to work, and on the way the little guy was collecting leaves. Someone joked that he was collecting them to use as something to cover his privates, which then led to us joking that the ones he was collecting were a bit big.

He continued collecting junk as we walked back to work, including a few soft seed things, a ball about an inch across, that come off the trees all along the road.

We walked into the carpark at work, and the little guy dared me to throw one of the seed things at the director's window.

I didn't think there was anyway I'd be able to throw one of them that high up the building, and with good enough aim, so I tried, and was terribly surprised to see it shoot straight up there, bounce off the window, and fall down on someone's car parked under the window. LOL.

We went into the building, and I went upstairs. There wasn't anything useful going on, so I went back to my desk, to do some work.

While I worked, I downloaded the new tivo images that had been put up a couple of days ago, so I could test the updated script I'd done yesterday afternoon.

I worked while I waited for them to download. The senior DBA called me, and told me that he wanted to leave. I told him I would ready to leave in about 5 minutes, which was a bit of a fib, because there was 10 minutes left on the download.

I waited, frantically wishing it would hurry up, and then once the download was finished, I copied the images on to my 512MB memory thing, which took more time.

I was expecting the senior DBA to call again, and have a go at me for taking so long, since it was now about 15 minutes after he called, and I told him 5 minutes.

I packed up, and then I went upstairs. The senior DBA was still talking to the contract DBA. Eventually he decided to leave, and realised that he couldn't find his keys.

He knew he'd left his cigarettes and lighter at the pub, when we'd been there at lunch, so we found the phone number for the pub, and he called them, to find out if he'd left his keys there, but they hadn't seen them.

We looked all around, and had about 10 people looking, and after about 15 minutes, the little guy, who'd left, called the senior DBA, and told him that he had his keys, and we looked out the window, saw him sitting in the car, and he flashed the keys at us.

After his shenanigans of the last couple of days, I'd really had enough of him. The royalty manager had been helping us look, and when he found out what had been going on, he told us to tell the little guy that if he didn't pull his head in, then he'd be in trouble.

We left, went down to the carpark, the little guy had gone around, and left the keys, in a can of coffee ground, on the back of the senior DBA's car.

He waited in his car a length away, and when the senior DBA started to go over there, he started to drive away. He stopped, and we were able to speak to him, and I told him what the manager had said.

He didn't take me seriously, and I was at wits end, the last thing I want on a Friday afternoon, when I'm trying to get home, for those few hours a week, is to get stuck at work for longer than necessary, so I was beyond dealing with him, so rather than do something I would regret, I just got in the car.

The senior DBA finished talking to the little guy, and then got in the car, complaining about the coffee all over his keys.

We drove back, and I got dropped at home. I bummed around for a while, and went and got the mail, nothing interesting arrived this week.

I watched tv, found a bottle of wine in the fridge, the bottle I got to take to the restaurant for my mate's birthday last weekend I think it was, and drank that, and then I went to bed.