The usual.. got up, got ready, had breakfast.

I wanted to watch some tv, I usually watch the news headlines in the morning, and the reception was stuffed again, so I had to fiddle around to fix the aerial cable.

I walked to the cafe near the pub, this morning I was a bit later than yesterday, so they were already open. I got a coffee, while the senior DBA was off buying cigarettes from somewhere.

I went back to the car, the senior DBA was already there, and we drove to work, I was at work at 8.20am.

I continued rewriting the files, spent all morning on that, until I got a call from the senior DBA, he was going for lunch.

I went upstairs, to wait while people got organised, and we'd go to lunch. The new guy had to go to Orange for some training, and wasn't sure of the best way to get there from Maitland.

There should be a quicker way, than going down to Sydney, and then out west. We tried to find a map, or some directions to give him. I suggested he'd be better off not taking any of the advice from the three people that went on the last trip to Orange, since they managed to get lost both on the way there, and back, and added an hour on to the trip each time.

While we were there, the HR people from Orange were wandering around the building. I didn't have anything to do with them, since I'm not an employee of the Department, I'm a contractor.

We left, and walked down the street, we went to the mall, and into the shopping centre. There's a jeweller in there, so I went in, to find out about getting my watch fixed.

This was easy, as soon as I pulled the watch out of my pocket, the woman saw that the band had come off, and asked me if it was just the pin I needed to fix it. I told her that it was, and then she went over to find one.

I gave her the watch, and waited a couple of minutes while she found a pin the correct size, and put it in, fixing the watch.

The pin was $3, so I paid, and then left. The others were waiting out the front, and then we went around to the bakery, and got pies.

We went over to the service desk in Kmart, and asked if they had SIM cards. They told us that they do, they sell them from the section where the CDs and stuff are.

We decided to eat our lunch first, so we went outside, and found a seat in the mall. We ate our lunch, and then we went back into the shopping centre, into Kmart, and went to the CD section.

The senior DBA asked about a SIM card, and the staff said they'd have to find one, so we wandered around and looked at the DVDs while we waited.

The senior DBA went back to the counter, and I kept looking through the DVDs, with the guy from royalty.

He got his SIM card, and then we left, and started walking back to work.

We went into the pub on the way back to work, expecting the old librarian to be in there. He was in there, so we gave him the SIM card that we'd just bought for him.

He didn't have the phone, so we couldn't put it in for him, we told him that we'd sort it out later.

We went back to work, and I hung around upstairs for a little while.

The sysadmin told me that he was having problems with his flexsheet, this stupid application they've built in excel, that autocalculates people's holidays and flextime.

He'd moved it, since the network drive had been reorganised, and now the stupid thing was failing to open the data file, because it's got an absolute reference to the data file in the spreadsheet.

We tried to edit the settings of the flexsheet, but it's a protected sheet, and we don't know what the password is. I thought perhaps it was stored in one of the macros, but they were all protected and passworded too. Useless.

Eventually we worked out how to get it working, we recreated the original directory structure, and moved the files back where they came from, and it started working again.

I had suggested finding an unused copy of the application, since it must setup the path to the data file the first time you run it, and then replace the empty data file with the valid one, but the sysadmin couldn't remember where he got the application from.

I went back to my desk, and back to work, and continued working until the senior DBA called me to tell me he was leaving. I said I was working on a file, and I'd probably go when I finished that, and find him later.

I finished recoding the file I was working on, to find that it didn't work properly. I then went through to try to find where I'd stuffed up the coding.

I thought I found it, and made a few changes, but it still didn't work. I was scratching my head at that one, and kept going back and forth between making code changes, and testing it.

I then realised what I was doing wrong.. I was changing the code in one file, and uploading a different file to the server. As soon as I realised that, I uploaded the file I'd been changing, and then everything started working.

Now I created another problem though.. the function I was working on had to select a record from one table, insert it into another, and delete it from the original table.

My code wasn't exactly right, the select worked, but the insert failed, and then the delete worked, so I'd inadvertantly lost a record.

I still had all the details on screen, from the failed insert statement, so I was able to restore the record, by fixing the statement, and running it manually.

After this, I decided it was a good time to leave work, since I wasn't really working very well, it was about 5.30pm.

I walked down to the pub, and went to the room, and dropped off my stuff, then I walked across to the pub, to see who was in there. There were a few people from work in there, so I got a drink and sat down.

I wasn't there for very long, and I noticed that someone had been using paint thinner (there's renovations going on at this pub), and it was making me lightheaded. If I'd known that, I wouldn't have bothered to get a drink, and just would have sat here, inhaling deeply.

I couldn't handle much more of that, so I went out of there. I saw the chick from work, with her boyfriend on his push bike. Bugger, I should have stayed inside longer, and I could have avoided them.

I waited around for a few minutes, and all the rest of the people I was in the pub with came out, and then we walked down to the club.

We had drinks in there, and then I found that the ATM was out of order, so I couldn't get any more money.

I was about to go across the road, to the shopping centre, to get some money from the ATM in there, when the senior DBA told me that he had enough cash, and he'd lend me $50 until tomorrow.

I ordered dinner, bangers and mash, and paid extra for a bread roll with it.

We played pool while we waited for our dinner, and then it was served. A couple of times I reminded the guy about my bread roll, but I didn't get one.

We played pool again after that, and then the senior DBA left. I stayed in there with a couple of other people, and had a couple more drinks. I was about to leave, when the support guy asked to borrow $20.

I asked him if it was for a drink or something, because I thought he might be going to waste it in the pokies, but he told me it was to get a taxi home. I fished around, and found that I only had $10 left, so I gave that to him.

I left the pub about 9.55pm, walked back to the pub, and went to bed.