Due to non-disclosure agreements I can only be really non-specific about work, but this tale need to be told.

I am spending my weekend as per usual chained to my desk. Not physically but in these high tech days they have found a better way to do it. It’s a dastardly and demonic device known as a "pager". Whoever invented this form of cruel and unusual punishment needs a severe beating and then to be thrown in prison with a 300-pound sodomite named Bubba who wants to explore your inner child. A lot. Repeatedly. Squared.

Anyway, today’s fun was with application X from vendor Y. Application X spans about 8 high-end servers (give or take one, or two: trying to save my ass here folks!). Hundreds of internal users connect to this monstrosity to perform task Z. Then, they go to the outside world and connect to thousands of other places. Just for shits and giggles, it works in reverse too. I’m sure you get the point by now: this thing is massive and essential.

The bonus today? An update to fix bug #54,565 which involved some code, general tweaking, some prayers and a blessing on an EEPROM. For those not in the know when you get changes to programs from vendors they have some generally hieroglyphic information that is called a "release document" AKA "instructions"(more like "destructions" as I affectionately know them). In all honesty, everything is usually 99.9% correct. Unfortunately, 0.01% error is all you need to fuck something up royally, which is just what happened.

Your friendly neighborhood systems admin guy (me) applied said fix where appropriate and faithfully to the "destructions". Can you guess what happened? I knew you would! Upon a reboot the whole shebang started acting like a schizophrenic crack whore on speed only making less sense, while speaking in tongues. Being the experienced and levelheaded dude that I am I notice that this is not good. Worse than bad even. Fucking awful would be a better way to put it still.

So, what does your humble narrator do? Well, He backs out of said changes and makes things just like they were before. Pull an M$ adjustment (reboot) and everything is just as fine as hot apple pie. "OK, thinks the friendly neighborhood systems admin, "what’s with that?" Lets try again thinking, just maybe its possible the humble narrator missed something, somewhere. Back to the destructions.

What happens? Well, lets call this program "grandma". Grammy (for whatever reason) has no idea how to bake cookies. The obvious thing to do? Tell "grandma" how to bake the cookies. She nods, says that’s all well and good and smiles nicely. Then one might be tempted to ask "grandma" to kindly go bake some cookies. She smiles knowingly, gives you a wink and sets off. Only then "grandma" decides it would be a better idea to have an epileptic seizure, swallow her tongue and masturbate with a highly radioactive plutonium rod for good measure. All the while screaming "WHAT’S MY NAME BITCH!" Needless to say I find this somewhat disturbing. Considering I was expecting cookies and not a psychotic post apocalyptical sex-freak senior citizen with Tourette’s syndrome. Ok, then this can’t be right. Next step, scratch "grandma’s" cookie recipe. Bada Bing! Bada Boom! She is sweet as pie. Off to "Betty Crocker" (the vendor) to see what the fuck they put in ole granny’s recipe. "Sugar, spice and everything nice!" they say. Ok then.

What to do? I decide to examine the ingredients of the old biddy’s recipe. Turns out that what they sent in the mail doesn’t match what’s in the cupboard. Knowing what blue-haired kindly old Madame has in the cupboard they only sent what we needed. A dash of this, a dash of that. But they put it all in one pot named the same thing and called it cookies. What it really was just some new spice to the old recipe? Unfortunately, "Betty Croker" neglected to mention this in her recipe. So what you needed to do was pour the new pot into the old part and stir. Bravo cookies! No bizarre masturbating sexagenarian!

Just some good cookies, although I had quite lost my appetite by this point.

In other words, I was sent changed and new files only, so you had to overwrite the old or changed files, not replace the whole folder. Not included: batteries or that little tidbit. Sigh wasted time? 3.5 hours. On Saturday. Almost enough to make a fellow want to jump out of an airplane, nude, with no parachute.