Crappy Tuesday
Dec. 24th, 2003 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Tuesday was a shit day.
First of all we went to bed really late Monday night, around 2.30am with a 7am wake-up call. Which already made me grouchy before even falling asleep. It took me a while to fall asleep because the brain was going at 100 mph and wouldn't quit long enough for me to get an easy sleep, even though I was really tired. Then at 4am I get woken up because PreZ is shivering violently and is feeling freezing cold, even though he's radiating heat like a live volcano. Finally after warming him up and bundling him in a sweater and sweatpants we managed to drop off to sleep again, for those few hours remaining before the alarm clock o' doom told us otherwise.
Then off to NJ. PreZ had to spend the day at the company's datacenter to work on the systems, and I was going to head off to Ikea to get the last remaining gift for a relative. Even though the datacenter is in Weehawken NJ and the Ikea I was going to was only about 3 exits down on the NJ Turnpike at Elizabeth it took me like an hour and a half to get there. NJ absolutely SUCKS for signposting. You see one sign pointing the direction to the location you need to be, and then the rest of the signs fall off the face of the planet. And this isn't the first time I've had this issue in NJ, it's also happened trying to find the goddamn Garden State Parkway entrance near Paramus, which has a small sign on the side of the road, half hidden behind a bush at crawling-toddler eye-level, in an area where the next oppertunity to U-Turn is about 5 miles down the road or so.
Ikea on the otherhand was pretty quiet, which is surprising because in Holland Ikea is hella busy no matter what time of day or day of the week you choose to go to it. It seems as though only weekends are the killer for the US Ikea's. Not that I'm complaining, it's nice not to have to fight your way through about 4368940 other Ikea goers to get to the checkout. Got the gift, and now we hope of course that PreZ's aunt will like it
After Ikea I headed back to the datacenter, where it took like half an hour for me to get put on some access list so I could actually enter. Security like Fort Knox just to walk around a large room full of caged computers. Kudos to any person who has to spend the day configuring machines in there, the incessant noise of whirring fans and computer motors would drive me berserk, we have enough of that kind of white noise in our computer room because of all the machines running, and PreZ's comp being on the desk with extra fans being the loudest perpetrator of the noise in this room. Aside from the noisy whir, it's also windy in there, which is probably a combination of climate control and the thousands of computer fans... not helpful for a guy who's already been smacked down with what seem to be the first symptoms of flu.
Then I just sat around combatting severe fatigue and boredom for something like an hour and a half until PreZ was all done and we headed off to battle traffic. To get to the Turnpike from the datacenter you join traffic just coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan, which at around 5.30pm is pretty hellish, though it was mostly the on-ramp that was slowest, things moved well on the Turnpike. Some Wendy's food on the way home, and we ended up crashing into bed at about 9.30pm, which is insanely early for us. And of course the one night you go to bed early, in a household where (personal) phonecalls are a rarity, you get called a couple of times.
So all in all a pretty frustrating day indeed.
First of all we went to bed really late Monday night, around 2.30am with a 7am wake-up call. Which already made me grouchy before even falling asleep. It took me a while to fall asleep because the brain was going at 100 mph and wouldn't quit long enough for me to get an easy sleep, even though I was really tired. Then at 4am I get woken up because PreZ is shivering violently and is feeling freezing cold, even though he's radiating heat like a live volcano. Finally after warming him up and bundling him in a sweater and sweatpants we managed to drop off to sleep again, for those few hours remaining before the alarm clock o' doom told us otherwise.
Then off to NJ. PreZ had to spend the day at the company's datacenter to work on the systems, and I was going to head off to Ikea to get the last remaining gift for a relative. Even though the datacenter is in Weehawken NJ and the Ikea I was going to was only about 3 exits down on the NJ Turnpike at Elizabeth it took me like an hour and a half to get there. NJ absolutely SUCKS for signposting. You see one sign pointing the direction to the location you need to be, and then the rest of the signs fall off the face of the planet. And this isn't the first time I've had this issue in NJ, it's also happened trying to find the goddamn Garden State Parkway entrance near Paramus, which has a small sign on the side of the road, half hidden behind a bush at crawling-toddler eye-level, in an area where the next oppertunity to U-Turn is about 5 miles down the road or so.
Ikea on the otherhand was pretty quiet, which is surprising because in Holland Ikea is hella busy no matter what time of day or day of the week you choose to go to it. It seems as though only weekends are the killer for the US Ikea's. Not that I'm complaining, it's nice not to have to fight your way through about 4368940 other Ikea goers to get to the checkout. Got the gift, and now we hope of course that PreZ's aunt will like it
After Ikea I headed back to the datacenter, where it took like half an hour for me to get put on some access list so I could actually enter. Security like Fort Knox just to walk around a large room full of caged computers. Kudos to any person who has to spend the day configuring machines in there, the incessant noise of whirring fans and computer motors would drive me berserk, we have enough of that kind of white noise in our computer room because of all the machines running, and PreZ's comp being on the desk with extra fans being the loudest perpetrator of the noise in this room. Aside from the noisy whir, it's also windy in there, which is probably a combination of climate control and the thousands of computer fans... not helpful for a guy who's already been smacked down with what seem to be the first symptoms of flu.
Then I just sat around combatting severe fatigue and boredom for something like an hour and a half until PreZ was all done and we headed off to battle traffic. To get to the Turnpike from the datacenter you join traffic just coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan, which at around 5.30pm is pretty hellish, though it was mostly the on-ramp that was slowest, things moved well on the Turnpike. Some Wendy's food on the way home, and we ended up crashing into bed at about 9.30pm, which is insanely early for us. And of course the one night you go to bed early, in a household where (personal) phonecalls are a rarity, you get called a couple of times.
So all in all a pretty frustrating day indeed.