and things went downhill from there

(By the way, I friggin' love this song!)

I knew that it was only a matter of time before the shit would hit the fan closer to home after a railroad (who shall remain unnamed) let an unattended train of tank cars roll down the hill and blow up a town in Quebec a bit.

Today, when the full realization sunk in of how much it would cost them to rebuilt a town and compensate the families of a few dozen people they vaporized, the railroad predictably declared bankruptcy.

I had long since logged out for the day, and expected my most pressing decision for the evening to be whether I should have a pre-dinner beer. atara had just returned from work, and was sitting across from me checking her various CSS feeds of jaeger smut news and stuff when the phone rang. Usually the only people who call at that time of the evening are telemarketers, so when she glanced at the phone and quizzically said, "It's a 403 area code...?" I grabbed it before it could bounce to voice mail.

As I suspected, it was my boss. I had sent him an email about the current state of the project I am on right before I logged out, and I assumed he was calling to give me kudos or grief for the state of the project. Instead, he said, "The top just blew off the shit pot and it's hitting all the wrong fans. We need stuff! Now! Yesterday! But you don't have to do it tonight since you're off work..."¹

Ugh. Sometimes it sucks being one of the few people left in the company who knows how to get things done very quickly. When I pressed him on it, he admitted that he would be stuck there for as long as it took to produce the figures our VP was after, so I remoted back into my machine at work and spent the next 30 minutes building something to tide them over. They will probably be breathing down our necks tomorrow, but I think we provided them enough to keep our lawyers happy for the evening.

¹ (I may be paraphrasing here a bit.)

There is an infectious grumpiness sweeping through our company lately.  I don't know what's causing it, but it seems that every second bit of correspondence I've seen lately has come with a complimentary chip on the shoulder, just waiting for somebody to say the wrong thing.  I took a small dig at one of our programmers the other day to which he took understandable umbrage (a bit out of proportion to the comment, IMO, but it's not my job to tell somebody how offended they should be by one of my comments).  I apologized to him today when we spoke, and in turn he acknowledged that, in retrospect, my comments hadn't really been off-base.

I'm going to be extra cautious for the next while.  I don't plan to walk around on eggshells, but I am going to ensure that I behave in a professional manner and keep my personal feelings at arm's length.  I'm not sure that I have the solution to our current malaise, but at least I can avoid being part of the problem.