Fourth day not seeing another person outside this house. Pictures and Twitter make me know they still exist, but I’m beginning to question that. Not sure I can stay cooped up another day.

I’m in a bit of a sour mood today. It’s the culmination of several things, all individually very small and meaningless, but together have me sulking in bed wishing the day were over. The first is the weather, or more accurately the environment. Combine the overbright sunshine reflecting off the snow with short periods of daylight and the whole world runs a bit wonky for a time. In addition, it’s cold in the daylight and very cold in the night.

Next, we have the fact that my car is still stuck in the snow. The driveway is otherwise cleared, so if I move my car, it wouldn’t take long to finish clearing off everything. The part of the driveway I park on isn’t particularly wide, about one car’s width, as it was added on and not really designed to be full-width. Due to the relative uncontrollability lent to vehicles with the snow on the ground, I went ahead and parked as far over as I could to ensure that the people I live with could get up the other side of the driveway safely. This has left the several-foot-high drift beside my car in a near-unreachable state, since much of the driveway snow was thrown over to the side yard, and the north wind naturally wrapped around the car, dropping off its carried snow where it pooled. So, were I to mount an effort to leave, I would have to move this mountain just to get into the car. The passenger’s side isn’t as bad, but climbing over the center console isn’t really an option (my car is too small and I am too large).

Of course, if I’d wanted to leave this morning, I’d have been stuck even with no snow, as one of my roommates parked behind me. On its own, not a problem, it’s a twenty-second task to move the car over. But, when you’re already looking at moving mountains to get where you’re going, sliding past another car just kills any motivation you may have had. So I resolved to staying home another day. He did move his car later on in the day, but by that time, there was only an hour or so of daylight left, and it just didn’t seem worth it.

On top of all that, my mother dropped a snarky comment on one of my Flickr items toward the evening. I know she was trying to be funny, but it was the kind of humor I’m not a huge fan of (essentially, deprecating humor; it has its places, and I may have misinterpreted it, but that hardly matters when you add it on everything else). Considering it involved the driveway where my car was still encased in snow, it just really threw me into a bad mood. “Fine, whatever,” I thought to myself, “she doesn’t know the way it is.”

I decide to use my last known always-a-good-time to salvage my mood and my day, 1 vs. 100 on Xbox Live, but even it couldn’t help me. First, the batteries in my controller died. After I’d pulled out a spare set, their server started crashing. And crashing more. I eventually gave up on it and just spent the night stewing in lonely sadness, listening to random music, skipping to songs that fit my mood. But, even if I could leave, where would I go? I can't think of anyone I'd want to call to hang out right now. Everyone's somewhere else, I think they're busy, or they're part of why I feel this way.

But today’s over. Tomorrow will be better. I need to get out of this house and do something, even if it’s just walk around in a snow-covered park.

If you e-mail me a .zip file which contains a file you'd like me to look at, please wait until I've had at least enough time to open an e-mail, download the attachment, unzip the file, and wait for the 14 meg text file to open before asking if I've discovered anything. Pressing "send" then immediately asking me on Messenger will always lead to the same result: "I haven't even seen the e-mail yet."

David Salaguinto, a writer for Microsoft's Office Online has a great web-comic called "Office Offline."  Go check it out, he's much better at it than I am.

Man, I really need to change the skin on this blog... if I haven't done it by this time next year, ridicule me until I do.

It's easy to get caught up in yourself.  After all, there's no one you spend more time with.  But, once in a while, stop to consider how your actions are affecting those around you -- at work, at home, with friends, wherever.  And I'm not talking about the obvious here (if I kick you in the shin really hard, you'll have to go to the doctor-type obvious).  No, I'm talking about the more subtle interactions.  Because you'd be amazed how easily one small mistake on your part can ruin another person's day entirely.

Last night, we had a goal in mind.  One of my team members was going to handle some hardware installation, then I was going to take over and do some of the software-side.  This is client-affecting, so our work has to be done in the middle of the night.  He was supposed to start around 8:30 PM, then call me when he was done.  I figured his part would be about 3-4 hours of work, between everything that had to be done and adding in a gap for the inevitable "Something went wrong" phase, and I wanted to leave myself at least 3 hours to finish up, with a drop-dead time of 6 AM.  This leaves plenty of time to work with, and we had a reasonably speedy retreat plan, in case something we didn't expect came up or we couldn't finish in time.

So, I prepared myself for the late night ahead.  Left a little early, grabbed a coffee on the way home, switched into something a little more comfortable than my stuffy work clothes, and set in for the wait.  I gave him a call around 9:30 to see how things were going, only to find he'd got side-tracked and hadn't even left yet.  That was fine, there was still plenty of time to work with.  I finished up my evening's browsing (yay, Flickr!) and fired up the xbox for some nice distraction.  After a few more hours (around 1), I gave him another call.  He'd run into an issue with something or the other, but he'd worked through that and was ready to really get rolling.  By this time, I figured we wouldn't have enough time for him to finish his part and for me to finish my part.  So, I told him to do his part and execute our rollback plan, and to call me if he ran into anything else.  He finished that up a little before 4 this morning.  This means we did accomplish something, but not everything we'd hoped for.

So, what was the mistake?  Well, the first mistake was in getting side-tracked.  This cost us a good hour and a half or so, which would have been the difference between finishing his part and finishing my part.  The second was in not calling me to let me know he'd run into a problem.  This one doesn't affect the times any (he'd still have to work around the issue, whether he'd called me or not), but it does mean that I could have known staying up longer was a likely pointless activity, only to be repeated the next night.  Maybe I should have called again around 11 or 12, but I was trusting him at least until my "expected time" was up.

But, that's fine, right?  Just a part of the job?  Well, yes, that's why I'm not angry, and why I'm writing a blog nearly no one will read as opposed to bringing it up in front of the office.  I know it made him feel awful, because he hates to fail, living in constant fear that he isn't good enough (if he could get over that, he'd soar), and that's without knowing how it affected me.  I have been sacrificing sleep for the past month and a half already, plus I have challenged myself to limit my coffee trips this year.  So, I've burned sleep and wasted a coffee run.

But, as I said, he feels bad enough already, telling him this won't actually help anything.  Neither will telling the rest of the office.  But I want to vent, and this seems like a good lesson to learn -- every once in a while, look at how your actions affect those around you.  See if there's anything you could have done different, then use that understanding to guide your actions in the future.  I just hope I can live up to these words I've written.