Workin' for the man every night an' day...

I can't believe that it's Thursday night. (Well, OK, it's Friday morning, barely.)

I can't believe that it's 12:28 a.m., on a night that I got off work at 4:30 (only because I was going to a doctor's appointment) and I'm still freaking awake.

It's been a long week. A long two weeks, actually.

Without being hideously disloyal to my new employer (who I really, really love), the process of "going live" for our latest major client has been a minefield of screw-ups, and we've hit a whole bunch of them in the 10 short days since we cut live. Our small band of intrepid warriors have been battling bad converted data, bad software and systems interfaces, and a genuine lack of disseminated data about the client. Consequently, I've been at the office until 1 AM the last three days, and this weekend promises to be another long one.

There have been thoughts, especially in the last 24 hours, that I've given up one form of being half-alive for a slightly better-compensated form of the same condition. That there has to be more to life than this. That I did much better at this schedule at thirty-eight than I am doing at forty-eight. My info-technology skills picked up a lot of rust and barnacles over the last three years of getting into (and out of) seminary, and I have heard the voices in my head saying, "You're just not the right person for all this."

But the primary fact I learned from my 12 years at Sprint was that a sense of humor was critical to survival - even more critical than having the right data. And it's also important to realize what a "bad day" really looks like. As Robert Fulghum once wrote, "It's important to remember that a lump in your oatmeal and a lump in your throat and a lump in your breast are not all the same lump."

For now, I am grateful to have what I have - and more than ready to be "workin' for the weekend."