Sunday Bloody Sunday

"Yo, Dawg!"

It's Freddo. This can't be good. It never is.

"You gotta help me, mate!"

I gotta?? I never saw any clause in my contract which read "Der Arbeitnehmer ist verpflichtet, Freddo zu helfen wenn er dringend bittet oder den Begriff 'mate' verwendet".

"You're not doing anything this weekend, are you?"

I dunno... relaxing, cleaning, catching up on My Name is Earl, downloading kitty pr0n... I have 18Mb broadband; the possibilities are almost endless.

And when I write "endless" I mean it. The entire Speedy Gonzalez collection, Dexter, even every episode of 1970s George Peppard in Banacek! And while file-sharing may not be completely legal over here, at 16 Traci Lords was. But I digress.

There are a lot of things I can do on a weekend. I live near three museums and there's a huge farmer's market nearby. But my second-most favouritest thing to do on a weekend is Not Work, running a close competition with doggie-stylin' with Lassie, my SuperSnarkyBitch, if only because I can do the latter on most normal weekdays as well.

There was a problem with this past weekend's availability plans, that problem being that no one was actually available. Three out sick, two normal weekend stand-bys on vacation, Freddo was desperate. I mulled it over. The deal was shit from the get-go. No munniez for working Saturday: work it like a normal day in exchange for a future weekday off. No prob, my ticket list is quiet. Sunday sucks though. A whole fifty for staying home all day in case something comes in, plus some hourly compensation for actual emergency work done.

Lassie was out of town until 8pm or so, I'd only work as secondary from 9-2 and then primary from 2-5, then hand over whatever shit sandwich I was chewing to the poor Weekend Alliance fuckers in the US, giving me time to shower and shave before picking Lassie up from the train station.

And Sunday? Fuck. No one does shit on Sunday unless there's an unresolved problem from Saturday which should be able to be ping-ponged. At the very least there's all sorts of busy-work to hand 'em until Monday rolls around. I'd planned to spend the day at home with Lassie anyway.

And lo, it came to pass that this mutt accepted the piss-poor deal.

And there was great rejoicing as Saturday remained as dull as a corporate quarterly meeting while requiring even less attention. And the Canine who is Really Evil was gladdened by the knowledge that Sunday would consist of no suckage and much glad-you're-back-home doggie-stylings with Lassie.

And upon awakening and well and truly knowing his bitch the Canine did log in and lo!, $ScoreCo did find themselves truly hated in the eyes of the Really Evil. For $ScoreCo had done Something Wrong and were demanding assistance. There was much gnashing of teeth and dumping of cores and no one working the weekend shift who knew diddly-squat about Solaris.

Then did the Canine remember the Golden Rule of Solaris: Truss Don't Lie. Thus he spake the magic words: "Send me a truss." And $ScoreCo did dutifully send a truss of a truly gargantuan size and proportion such as has never been seen before by any $MegaCorp monkey. And he did setteth his head in the ReallyEvilCanine's-head-shaped-dent in front of his keyboard as he realised $ScoreCo had trussed the entire system and not just the crashing process.

And it came to pass that the Canine did begin to relax as he realised it would be only another quarter of an hour before his relief in the US would be on-line, and lo, he did tell $ScoreCo to truss only the crashing processes.

And as his IM window opened, the Canine did see who in the US was taking over, and he allow a truly wicked grin to come over his face, for his replacement that day was none other than the monkey well-known throughout $MegaCorp for his regular Registry and Event Viewer log requests of customers running UNIX.

Thus did our hero log out and get back to his bitch, and the world became a slightly more tolerable place, if only for the 13 hours he would have before having to return to the Cube Desk of Hate at the Panopticon high above Munich.