Let me say this up front: Smirk is no longer allowed to take vacations, work related or otherwise.
Early this morning (around 5:00 am) I had to deal with a downed machine in The Data Center In Charlotte. That involved calling said Data Center (long distance, because there was an issue with their 800 number [1]) and walk a technician through running fsck on a corrupted file system.
Then this evening (around 5:00 pm) I had to deal with a downed data center in The Data Center in Boca Raton (yes, that sounds silly, but if customers who get their Internet connection through our Data Center In Boca Raton can't get out to the Internet, and when we can't get in to The Data Center In Boca Raton from the Internet, then we have to assume the worst—that al-Qaeda took out the site from orbit, just to make sure). This involved several frantic calls between Smirk, R (a customer and partner of ours) and Dan the Network Engineer, and a five minute drive through a thunderstorm (I wasn't worried about being struck because, as everybody knows, being struck by lightning, along with getting bit by a radioactive spider [2], being caught in a gamma radiation blast [3], or getting washed with nuclear waste (Modern Problems) [4], confers superhero abilities in a person) to find a rather confused UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) on battery mode (with full battery power) but not supplying power to the devices plugged into it (go figure).
The last time bad things like this happened, Smirk and I were on a business trip [5], and the only common element between the two times—Smirk was out of town.
Oh wait … that was in August as well.
Hmm … perhaps August should be cancelled.
Nah, Smirk is not allowed to take vacations.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll-free_telephone_number
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man#Fictional_character_biography
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulk_(comics)#The_Hulk