crazy work week and background for fiction

So I knew this week was going to be crazy. I was just wrong on the details.
I started the week off knowing that I had to get my GIAC certification done before my second class started on Saturday. The only time I had to review the material, take practise exams and take the actual certification exam was during the work day. Luckily work is paying for the exam and my boss is of the opinion I can manage my own schedule. On Monday I got a little review done. Tuesday I got some more done and stayed a little late to take a practise exam. Did ok on the exam. Wednesday I decided to just go for the actual cert instead of a second round of review and practise exam. Good thing I did too. There is a three hour window to finish the exam and I needed every second. About halfway through the exam I started getting horrible network delays. I would press "submit" for a question and have to wait a minute or longer for the next one to appear. I was not sure if I would get enough answered correctly before that caused me to be behind enough that it was impoissible for me to pass. As it turned out I was able to get enough done to pass before I ran out of time. A huge relief for me. So it is 6:30pm on Wednesday and I open my office door, much to the surprise of several of my coworkers that had no idea I was still in the building. They were running around dealing with a problem with several systems using our SAN. To make that story short, we have been working on that SAN problem since Wednesday late afternoon. It is now Friday evening, approaching 9pm. Two of my coworkers have been here nonstop since this started, one of them my boss. This is sort of computer problem a sysadmin tech person has nightmares about as the SAN contains the data for all of our critical services. And we had to reboot it.
Keep in mind the SAN is actually six different sets of hard drives in two different buildings, designed such that it should never have to be rebooted. And we had to reboot it. Not sure if it worked yet but it is definitely making life interesting.

So I stayed late Wednesday night and did what I can to help out. I am not a server admin so mostly I just made sure the problem was not in the network and opened up a few ports for some different kinds of testing. I have actually been able to go home each night. I woke up really early on Thursday. Long before I was supposed to get up to go in early for some scheduled maintenance that needless to say has not happened. A very vivid and strange dream woke me that morning. Half asleep I tried to understand what I saw in the dream and try to explain to myself how the events could have taken place. As I did this a detailed story was created in my head. The post called "fiction part 1" is an attempt to see if I can get all of these details down on paper and out of my head. I am curious how it will go as I have not done anything like this before. And I had time to get a good start on it as I waited for various things to get done on Thursday. Friday was busy enough that this is the first time I have had to post. And no time to try to get the next segment of the story straightened out enough to post.

Tomorrow is the first day of my 2nd class. It should make for a nice break from these 14 hour days at work. Granted, I might be coming into work after class is done.

Such is life.
*smiles*
be well