Welcome To My Nightmare

So my scanning program at work broke yesterday, and daily backups are taking ten hours to complete. Our only guess, at this point, was that the sheer number of tiny files that the scanning program makes was screwing things up—so today I undertook a task I had been putting off for quite some time: burning data to DVD.

Except that I didn’t actually get anything burned today. There’s a fairly elaborate process you have to go through to nicely separate files from the database, and part of the process involves moving the files to a separate folder within Windows. As a DVD holds 4.3 GB of data (or so), and the files are all less than 5 Kb…that’s a lot of files for the OS to keep track of, and so this process takes a damn long time. I spent six hours working on the sucker today (trying to find work to do while you wait for a progress bar to move is annoying), and managed to get to the point where I’m ready to suck the data across the network to my machine, where I can then burn the DVD. I anticipate that both of those steps will take a significant amount of time, as well. I don’t know our network speed, but I’ll be surprised if it’s 100baseT.

Meanwhile, I’ve tied up my scanning machine with this progress bar, so I can’t scan new batches. As it’s the end of the month (and thus another bonus cutoff), everyone in the office is throwing batches at me as fast as they possibly can, and they’re building up mighty quick. Furthermore, Marin needs me to scan batches so she can do her work…so her stuff is piling up as well. But I can’t add anything until I get burn these DVDs and (hopefully) alleviate these issues we’re having with the server.

I’m also sick (again), and sleep deprived. And school starts on Monday—and at that point, neither Marin nor I will ever be able to catch up.

I really didn’t want to work that much this week. Really. Now I need to get to bed so I can get up hella early tomorrow and continue my nightmare.

A Sidenote: this evening I read about a magnitude 8.0 earthquake that hit Japan today (no deaths reported, luckily), with a similarly sized aftershock that hit an hour or so later. Six days ago Japan had a 5.5 magnitude quake. This would have been the second week of Andy’s and my exciting two-week trip to Japan that fell through. Maybe it’s a good thing we were lazy in planning our trip out, after all….

 

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