So I went to my high school reunion at the top of the month. We spent way too much money, which in our lower-middle-class world means ANY money, but I figure that 20 year reunions only come around, well, every twenty years, and I was determined to go.

We returned home flat broke but able to survive the week until the next paycheck. Meanwhile, my poor 6-year-old Pentium III VAIO is on its last legs. Power supply fan is out, keyboard keeps screwing up, hi-speed internet won’t stay up. Thankfully, my wife just took on a full-time position where she works as a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant), so she’ll have larger paychecks and we can get ahead of the bills and get one of those new cheap Dells…

(cue thunderclap)

…but Sunday, my wife was working, trying to lift a patient in a manual-lift bed, when she exacerbated an old back injury. The nurse on duty noticed and required that she go home and then go into the hospital the next day for a Workman’s Comp claim. Part of that claim is a drug test as well.

(cue lightning)

The injury was not that serious, but “rules are rules”. However, my wife has a lifetime of experience working in HR and realizes that a Workman’s Comp claim is a black mark on your record when you go to apply for jobs. She didn’t want any handicaps to her new career as a nurse, especially coming into the market as a woman over 40 (which she’ll be by the time she graduates). Furthermore, she takes a few legitimate medications which could cause a positive result on a drug test (you probably are, too), plus she lives with me and my second-hand smoke, and a failed drug test would doom her fledgling career. She tried one of those detox and drink lots of water and self-drug-test regimens (cost: $60 we don’t have), immediately puked it all up, and spent the rest of the day sicker than a dog.

(cue drizzle)

So she resigned, effective immediately, rather than get the Workman’s Comp. I’m not really upset, since the job was very physically demanding and this was really starting to take a toll on her health (like she says, “I’m 39, not 29”). You know that “for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” part? I’ll take poor and healthy over rich and sick any day.

But that means we’re back to surviving on my income alone. No more big full-time or even small part-time wife paychecks. No new Dell for us.

(cue rain)

Oh, and my appeal to get my health insurance just was accepted. But that means they’ll be retroactively removing the premiums that should have come out of my last two paychecks… next paycheck.

And September approacheth, meaning fall term for wife’s nursing school… and the associated tuition and books expenses.

And my little kitty Ziggy is in desperate need of another vets appointment.

(cue torrential downpour)

And the big huge gargantuan everybody-in-the-company-uses-it software upgrade project that went live today has turned out to be an absolute disaster on the desktop side… they never bothered to test it on an actual desktop client environment, so I come in this morning to word that two Internet Explorer ActiveX Security Settings, five Windows Registry Keys, and a new Client Application update must be deployed to over 150 desktops in our network.

It’s not too much of a problem for a Network Administrator to set up those kinds of changes and deployments through Microsoft Active Directory… if the proper infrastructure for that was set up, which it isn’t. Oh, and did I mention the Network Administrator quit eight weeks ago and has yet to be replced? And the other Desktop Technician, my co-worker who had been here forever and probably knew enough to pull it off, quit four weeks ago and has yet to be replaced?

(cue flash flooding)

So yours truly is ass-deep in alligators with no clue how to drain the swamp.

There is hope. I’ve just learned three new technologies on the fly (creating Group Policies, creating software deployment packages, and tying the two things together), but for whatever reason they refuse to get along and play nice like the Microsoft support site said they would.

And I’ve got a headache, which I never get, and my food intake has been limited to the Gatorade I had in the fridge and a Lean Cuisine from the microwave, since there has been no time to get out for lunch.

So please forgive me if I’m light on the posting. This post has taken all day, written in the 30 second snips between reboots, refreshes, and Googling.

Oh well. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

Wait a minute. They don’t pay me the big bucks. Fuck this shit.