The Brain & The Strain

Work!! work! work!! The last 4-5 months of my life has been only work. I don't quite manage to understand it always and that makes things even worse. I am not a techie and I am not passionate about the stuff that I work on, yet the sheer magnitude of work has meant that my poor tiny brain had no option but to store it in the limited memory available . Memory?? I wonder how much it would be? I guess it would be limited to some KB. My inbox size has however exceeded it's limit thanks to the n number of mails and the freebie documents that come along. The first thing that I need to do in the New year to delete all the unnecessary mails ( I usually don't do this on a regular basis) and free my inbox.

Going back to my poor tiny brain, its capacity and its likes and dislikes. ( For a moment, let me treat brain, mind, heart, soul and conscience as one and the same :) ). I believe the mind usually takes in stuff that it likes and leaves the rest. Given a choice, it won't like to take in anything that doesn't appeal to it. But sometimes in cases like mine, the brain has little choice. After working for all the Open hours ( eyes open ) in front of the computer with those Mainframe jobs and abends, it tends to carry with them even when in its asleep. Well, this is what happened to me in the last few days ( what actually happened and what I understood seemed to be quite different)

What Mom said : Hey , get up, you have been asleep for more than 10 hours now

What I heard it as : Hey, get up the batch has started more than 10 hours ago and is stuck with a job abend, you need to resolve it ASAP.

What Dad said: Get up now, you have been sleeping like a log .

What I replied : What's your problem mate? All the 3 output files are coming out fine as per the expected results. I have already sent out the abend log ( I was thinking that it was a damn testing team guy complaining about the results, My poor Dad is no tester and hence couldn't make head and tail of it )

Satya was my room mate in Melbourne. This is what had happened when he tried to wake me up. He had reached the office that day and was calling me on my hotel room number

What Satya said: Hi Good morning .. have you woken up? When will you be coming to office? Your PM is waiting in the office for you.

What I replied: ( I saw the time and it was 9:30 am. I was working on some damn Mainframe screen the last night). Hi Satya.. Good morning. Can you do me a favor please ? Please check if everything is fine with the "9:30 screen" ( The brain seemed to pick up the things that it saw last "The time 9:30" and the "screen" and made a combo out of it). At the other end, Satya was non-plussed. My PM let me sleep for another 3-4 hours when he heard of the "9:30 screen".

In one such instance when my Mom woke me up for the problem in the batch ( the 10 hour thing ) , I got up and immediately switched my computer on. I was trying to figure out what was going wrong. The only other thing that was active in the Brain's memory was the India-South Africa match. The brain ordered the fingers to do an F6 and open the cricinfo page. The match hadn't started for the day yet. For a good 5 minutes , I was trying to figure out how a cricket match is run by a Mainframe batch and if there was something that I could do to kick off the match. What could be the Mainframe job to get the Cricket match going ? How does it normally happen in a Live Production scenario? My mind was jammed with all such thoughts. It was only after the "Colgate Gel" effect in my mouth that I realized that I was going nuts. Ah ...My Poor tiny brain... you seem to more confused than I am!