Failures, Fishtails and Fisticuffs

An alliterative description of my weekend.

I was hoping for a quiet Friday at work to ease into St. Patrick's weekend; alas, the silence was shattered by a 4:15am phone call from work. "The network is down!" I wind up at the datacenter at 6am with a jumbo coffee and 2 muffins. Not to go all IT geek on everyone, but our hosting company pushed out some network patches that our router didn't appreciate, so it went out on strike. I conference with their network team, reboot the router, we're back in business. "Oh boy," I think, "I'll work until 2:30 and call it a day." Uh uh...turns out our network time server was also corrupted and pushed out an October 1994 date to all of our production servers. Long story short, I didn't get out until 5:45 pm...sustained only by coffee, Diet Coke and those muffins.

I should mention here that we had a snowstorm Friday. By the time I got on Rte. 93 to head home, the road was in poor shape. As I headed past Commerce Way, I started skidding to the right. Now, I know you're supposed to steer in the direction of the skid but applying that knowledge in the midst of sliding off the interstate isn't easy. So I whip the steering wheel to the left....straighten....then start whipping to the left twice as fast. I wound up doing a 180, facing backwards. Thank God there wasn't much traffic - no one was within a half-mile of me. I got myself turned around and got home without further mishap.

Finally fired up the snowblower the first time this season Friday night. Spent an hour digging out the homestead and helping out two neighbors. The next morning the kids next door came by @ 8:30 and asked if I wanted the sidewalk shovelled.

"How much?"

"I don't know."

"What kind of businessman are you?"

Turned out I paid them $20 and they did the cut and the driveway to boot. Good job shoveeling and negotiating. :-)

Took L. down to Mexico Lindo for dinner and margaritas Saturday night. had the grilled red snapper which was very good. caught the end of the Georgetown-BC game, then headed down to the local @ 10pm. Bootleg Willy swung by and we had a good time hanging and talking. At closing time, we walked around the corner to have one more at another establishment. Another young crowd, no problems...we're getting ready to go and on the way out we stop to talk to another regular. "Boy, it's been a quiet St. Patrick's Day!"

About a minute later, it started.

Someone brushes by me, then I see 2 knuckleheads wrestling toward the door. They go spilling onto the floor, knocking over a floor lamp in the process. The doorman and owner separate them.

Another minute passes, and two more knuckleheads get into it. Again, they get separated.

Now it's time for the main event. Another knucklehead throws a punch...at a woman. He gets thrown to the ground and is surrounded by 6 or 7 guys, all throwing punches at him. The knucklehead's friends come in to get him off the ground, and it's on. 15-20 guys fighting, 3 or 4 women squared off, people on the periphery throwing cups of beer at the combatants. It was the biggest fight I've seen in years. I finally just shook my head and moved back to the bar, mostly to avoid getting knocked over or hit by a stray punch. By the time we finally left, Willy counted 6 police cruisers on the street in front of the bar.

AI's barroom equation: alcohol + testosterone + youth = strife.

On Sunday I rested.