Well. Pulled an all nighter at work this evening.

I went to work yesterday at roughly 10AM (actually went into the office). Stayed at the office until about 5:30PM. Came home, had a quick dinner and then at about 7PM my time, started working again. Job went all kinds of wrong and as of this writing it is 5:04AM.

The sky is going a soft blue and a few neighbors have already left for work.

I probably have another 20-30 minutes of work left and then? Sweet, sweet sleep.

Last time I was on a night shift was many years ago, when as an (essentially) unemployed layabout I had got a few night's work in an aluminium smelting foundry stacking ingots for shipping.

Worst.Job.Ever. - But I digress...

Imagine, walking home covered from head to foot in black aluminium oxide dirt. I mean, I'd have to bath twice, once to wash the dirt, and a second time to wash the dirt residue from the dirty water of the first bath...

...so imagine, covered in dirt, after hours of stacking ingots in a dark smelly foundry...

...being stopped on the way home by someone wanting to know if I felt like accepting Jesus as my Lord and Saviour.

Gabe ... what are you doing now for work?

LOL @ Julius!

I'm with a defense contractor in the DC area and my job essentially is to virtualize the company's physical servers using...well...virtualization software.

The job is remote, so I work almost exclusively from home, but the servers are located at various datacenters around the country. Each server is done is a two part process. The first process is the initial data transference. This can be done without affecting the production environment. The servers remain on and functioning. So we generally do that part during the morning or daytime. The second part of the job is the data syncronization and the "cutover". This is when the virtualization software syncronizes any data on the physical server that may have changed during the daytime and then turns off the physical server, powers on the Virtual Machine (which is now a clone of that original server) and changes the network address.

This step requires a specified outage window, since the machine will briefly go offline and services will stop, plus after the "cutover" we login into the machines and change the IPs/remove unnecessary software and drivers/map any necessary drives, so forth and so on.

So dependent upon where the physical machine is located that evening start time could be anytime from 5pm EST to 8pm EST. The problem is, if you have a late start time and then something goes wrong...well it makes for some very long nights.

But then you also have nights like last night, where the entire process took me under 2 hours.

[quote:509314c331]I'm with a defense contractor in the DC area and.....[/quote:509314c331]....you had me at hello.....

*Nods head and pretends she totally understands*

I'm with you Porter ... lol ...

I was just in the DC area around Easter time. I love it there! I was thinking about moving there around that time, but things didn't seem to pan out. I'm very jealous :)

It's a nice area...aside from the oppressive state government in Virginia and the ticket happy cops and the high cost of living and the absurd traffic levels.

But overall I quite enjoy the DC area.

Yeah but most importantly......[b:a60a772d10]I'm with a defense contractor in the DC area and..... [/b:a60a772d10]


:D

Not as glamorous as it may sound.

Still, it's employment. :)

Yeah but [b:64fbbbcd1e]defense contractor [/b:64fbbbcd1e]....you don't need to explain anything after dropping that BOMB shell ;)

I don't get it? I don't work for the CIA! I work for Northrop Grumman!

www.northropgrumman.com

Clearly a cheap ass front organisation for the NSA or some other "security service".

Probably Homeland Security.

or Big Brother.