I have been gathering a huge sleep debt lately. A combination of very long and strange hours at work combined with doing what I can to take care of my family is adding up.

Monday morning, I was at work at 3:00 AM for a huge network change. We had a four hour window – one of our customers ramps up at 7:00 AM on the dot and all changes must be complete by then.

I’m pretty sure that all the NDAs that my employer is under prevent me from going into much detail, but I can say that it involves setting up a complete duplicate (but temporary) system in order to work through a massive migration required by one of our service providers. Monday’s change would have switched everything to the duplicate system so we could rebuild the original system before we begin a gradual migration back to it.

We’re working with an installer contracted by the system’s vendor to get through the migration. Everything on my company’s part of the system was ready to go before I left work on Friday. At 3:00 AM when we arrived, the temporary system was not ready – the vendor had not made some very critical changes. By 6:15 AM it was clear that it would not be ready in time, so we called off the switch.

We are now scheduled to begin a new outage at 2:00 AM, which is in 8 hours. Kathy just arrived with dinner, and once I eat it, I will be crashing so I can get up about 12:30 AM.