No more hiding in the server room

woe unto me becuase I'm working the weekend. How about you?

I run the IT department at an art museum. Here is a picture of one of the galleries about an hour ago:

Notice something? It is empty. Do you know why it is empty? Because we are CLOSED. Here is a shot of a few offices:

See how all the offices are dark? Again, because we are CLOSED. Perhaps you would like to come and see some of our art? Well TOO BAD!!! We are closed and, due to the holiday, we will stay closed until Monday.

Here is a picture of me:

Looks like I’m at my work doesn’t it? That’s because I am at my work! It so happens that this is one of the rare occasions where the company will be closed to the public for 48 hours straight and therefore it’s my big opportunity for fun and excitement! Yes, I’ll be enjoying such thrilling pastimes as upgrading the IOS on various routers and switches, redoing all the cables in the wiring closet (no way that would be monotonous), re-racking our network gear, and upgrading the firmware on our SAN arrays! Oh, I’ll also be dealing with issues related to this previous post.

Fun, fun, fun! I can’t imagine a better way to spend a weekend. Most of the time this kind of thing can be done remotely but as I’m primarily working with our network I really need to be onsite. I’ve worked most of today and I’ll be up and at it at the abhorrent, abominable hour of 5:00AM for another long day. Incidentally I hate mornings; it’s verging on obscene that hours before 10:00AM-ish even exist. I wouldn’t mind this so much if this wasn’t the way almost all of our closures went. Guess where I was Christmas Eve last year? Hint: not at home.

Oh, my wife totally loves this too, btw. Earlier conversation, paraphrased:

her: so you’ll be working all weekend?!

me: umm, yeah. Hey, I know! You can come in and hang out with me at my work!

her (unleashing the icy stare of death) I’d just sit in your office while you’re on your computer?

me: Well, umm … I could show you how to update the BIOS on desktops! It’s really easy and …

her: icy stare is cranking up to 11

me: .. and, umm, never mind.

So this is my whining, self-pitying, tale of woe. It could be longer but I’ve got work to do. As an aside; the security officers on duty right now are playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s smallest violin for me. We’ve had security officers on duty 24 hours a day, every day, since the first day the museum opened. So, for some unfathomable reason, they’re not really sympathetic.

So are you working this weekend? Care to share any tales of crazy hours?

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Isaac on April 8, 2010 at 1:12am

For quite a few years now we've been using Vernon CMS for our physical assets, but we aren't real thrilled with it anymore to be honest. We use OCLC ContentDM for our digital assets. We're strongly considering replacing Vernon with TMS but we've also been interested in Zetcom MuseumPlus. Migrating to another CMS would be a massive undertaking relative to our staff so it's something we're not going to be moving on quickly. We also have a small research library and we use ExLibris Voyager for that.

Do you work with collection management software?

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Permalink Reply by Rob Butterworth on April 14, 2010 at 4:46pm

We have a small (about 1000) object collection of antiques and other art and historical items that we recently started tracking in TMS Lite, which is working out reasonably well. I'm not that hands-on with it any more, leaving it to a couple of chaps (one from the V&A) who help us with it.

We have a huge paper archive that we are trying to get in shape, and we might track using new functionality in TMS for archives, too, but we're not settled on that yet.

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Permalink Reply by Graycat on April 7, 2010 at 6:25pm

I feel your pain, buddy. This is the first Easter weekend I've had off in about six years I think. To make things even better - I'm on annual leave all of this week too :o)

That said I think I did close to 600 hours over Feb + March doing a massive office move. Now it's mostly in and working I had to take some time off or just burn out and quit. It was getting so bad even the CEO started to notice. Mind you it's all worthwhile as by lunchtime on the first day the entire office was up and working like nothing had ever happened.

Public holidays are a great time to get into the guts or your environment and update / upgrade / tidy up / generally make good. Does anyone's employer give them something back for doing this? We don't get paid overtime but for something like that we'd get some time in lieu if we're really nice.

Good to see you're rocking the Green Goddess though ;o)

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Permalink Reply by Isaac on April 8, 2010 at 1:35am

That said I think I did close to 600 hours over Feb + March doing a massive office move

Ouch! Yeah, I've had similar hours when we spin up major new projects. I know what you mean about burn out ... after the project is you are done. I'm salary so in principal I don't get time off or extra pay regardless of how many hours I put in. That said, I can usually take a day off here or there for some downtime. The COO (my boss) has said she's happy for me to take a week or two off but the reality is that the company can't be without me for that long. It's not that I'm so great or anything it's just that IT is pretty slammed on work all the time. Plus I admin almost all of the backend infrastructure and I'm the only one who knows how everything works. A relative said that it's job security but I think it just sucks.

Good to see you're rocking the Green Goddess though ;o)
I love Laphroaig so very very much; it's by far my favorite drink. I would totally marry a bottle of it but I think that's only legal in the Netherlands. That said I've heard a lot of good things about Lagavulin and I've been meaning to pick up a bottle.