Here Be Dragons

The inside of my head is a terrifying place.

This evening I sat down to bang out a dispassionate reply to a business email, and before I knew it I had as many Powershell sessions open on about as many servers as my wife does tabs in Chrome. I will point out that her idea of browsing the internet typically comprises opening a tab for every page. She commits chromacide on a regular basis.

So there I was, trying to put together a simple checklist for a simple request, when I started wondering the stupidest thing ever to wonder before bed: what if? What if I was wrong about access restrictions? What if I can't manage this step? What if I try these steps in a stable environment?

Seemed simple enough, but invariably those questions lead me to the discovery that the 'stable environment' I intended to test was not quite so stable, and that of course meant more work, diagnostics, testing, querying, ooh-shiny-object-ing, and suddenly I'm migrating file servers in the middle of the night. And demoting domain controllers. And testing attribute-manipulation and export. And by God if I've gone that far, why not migrate DHCP and print servers? Maybe it's time for some overdue patching, too. Wonder if those SQL databases are in production. Why not screw around with those, too? And now I'm remembering why in hell I logged onto a RADIUS server 2 hours ago and abandoned the session.

It's a terrifying thing to be in here with all this crap. There's hardly any room for me. Because in spite of what I may be accomplishing in the middle of the night for my clients, I have yet to suspend my home phone or my satellite service, in spite of the fire having been almost 2 weeks ago.

But that's another part of my brain. One that I truly do not like to access: the one that uses the phone. Phones make me angry on principle. I find it far simpler to convey my thoughts in written form than verbally, even though others tend to disagree after reading one of my technical documents. I can be more specific where I think it's necessary and gloss over the minutiae. When I'm on the phone I tend to blather and over-share (who, me?), and I have trouble hearing people clearly on the other end. And the delay that cell phones impose is enough to make me want to scream. I...did...no, you...sorry...wha...GODDAMMITFUCKALLWHOGETSTOTALKFIRST?

So rather than take care of a few undoubtedly simple phone calls that would make me stop paying for services that I can't currently use, I sit here in the dark banging away at Powershell commands, making incredible discoveries that greatly simplify my job and increase my capacity to service my clients, assuming I remember them in the morning.

And wait...wasn't I working on some sort of checklist?

Dragons, indeed.