Up Again Fixing the Servers, Hating Life, Contemplating Colorado

Every two hours the servers wake me up by sending a text message to my phone. I hate that phone and every time it beeps a little piece of me dies. I haven't slept more than a couple hours at a time for six days. I've been working 18 hour days since last Friday. My quality of life is horrible. I'm miserable. All-consumed with these server problems. A self-imposed death march of grand proportions, swallowing everything in its path.

I want to quit, to call the whole thing off. To rewind to college and start over again. Or better, high school (I should have gotten laid more... or at all... who's the idiot who told me to save myself for someone special? horrible advice.)

TiVo sound... blooooop, blooop, bloop.

My life has gone wrong. I have no help. Everybody tells me that the servers're down but nobody can help. And that's my fault. Every time I launch a fix I think my problem is over and that I'll get my life back. But I never do. I always end up without sleep again. Exhausted. Spending every goddam waking moment trying to fix it. And for what? For the dream? What dream?

I haven't made a penny in five years. The credit card companies call incessantly. I owe hospitals, relatives, banks and everybody else in the world many hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't afford groceries or gas or the schooling that Ava needs. I literally have to ask permission to go buy $20 worth of groceries and frequently find myself opting to just not eat. Services in my life are frequently disconnected... cable, power, cell phone, internet. Banks threaten to repo the minivan regularly (because they don't know it's The GCoW and covered in chain grease.)

And now I can't sleep or focus on the race that I've trained a year for. My life sucks. Absolutely sucks. A complete misery. And it keeps getting worse. Has been for years. My fault, bad decisions. One after another.

I don't want to wake up in the morning. But I have to because the server calls my phone and tells me I have to. Because heaven forbid 7,500 bloggers from the Philippines... bloggers who're gaming dNeero to steal money from us... don't have their dNeero Flash widgets running. Because then they'll complain about the $0.00000045 they've lost because their impressions weren't recorded. So I keep the servers up. For them? Hardly. For myself so I don't have to respond to their nagging and functionally-illiterate customer support requests. Did I spell illiterate correctly? Not that I care. (And nothing against bloggers from the Philippines... actually the American bloggers are typically much less literate or able to explain the difficulty they're experiencing.)

There is no dream. I'm quitting very soon. But I can't do what I want to do. I can't do what I should have done after college. I can't go to Colorado and get my real life under way. Those paths are lost. Forever. Because I don't want to lose my kids. I want to be part of their daily lives. Because I want to pay back my debts. I want to be a person worth investing in. Because people in my life lied to me about the role they wanted me to play in their life. And I'm stupid enough to believe them when they lie again. So I'm stuck.

Aside from my kids, my training, my friends and my desire to be a generally creditworthy good responsible person I don't care about anything else any more. And you can read into that everything else that I've made you think I care about in life. This isn't a Zen moment of clarity. It's an admission that my life is completely off track and a terrible sham. Fighting the servers all day and all night. For no pay. For no relief. Trying to make this idiotic company work.

I'm not losing it. I've lost it. The dream is an illusion... always right there... just out of reach. The next meeting... the next big deal... the next trip... oh, it's just about to happen... so-and-so is excited about dNeero. Just endure one more week. Just get the servers running again and things will be great. Just absorb another ten thousand dollars in debt and all will be well. But it never is.

Because people are thankless when it comes to technology. Nobody thanks you for staying up all night to keep the servers running. Instead they ask you for just one small change. One small change that might take you another sixteen hours to design, code, test, deploy, see break and then fix. At which point they'll ask for just another small change. And oh how life will be grand if that change is made. It's so small. Just a favor to be completed in passing by the Wargames-esque computer hack master that I am. To them. Which only shows how much they don't understand my plight and how little they value the technology I create (they're correct, btw, all technology is useless and only the result of it is of any value... social connection, wisdom generation, nostalgia triggering, etc.) But I can make those changes. So I do. Because it feels so good when they use that shiny new feature. Oh, wait... they never actually use it. They think they need it until they have it and then it just sits there collecting digital dust... making the codebase bigger and harder to maintain... and causing sporadic bugs... that prevent me from sleeping... which prevents me from enjoying life. Small favor indeed.

All of which makes me a horrible business person. I should have stopped doing this stuff years ago and hired people to be miserable on my behalf. I should have elevated to managing my businesses, not doing them myself. I said I would after datablogging. Then idiots happened. So here I am with another huge codebase of my own and a pet monkey named Failure.

It's so familiar because... oh yeah... I've done this all before. Rewind to 2003... gotta keep the datablogging server up... oh no, oh no, the dream is being lost... just make it work or lose everything. Hardly. There never was a dream. And now my too-big codebase has a matching server farm to manage. So I'm a production sysadmin, a dba, a developer, a tester, a designer, a salesperson and somewhere in between all that I'm supposed to lead towards greatness for this company.

Well, I'm failing horribly. I'm not able to do it all. Or really any of it. Again, this isn't a Zen lightbulb moment where I see the light and suddenly realize that I've been wrong all along and can just change my ways. It's a character flaw. I don't want the funding because I don't want a funder. And obviously not having a funder isn't working.

Tonight I lose a) any illusions I may have had that I can continue to fool you into thinking my life is anything but completely crumbling before my very eyes b) my open water swim tomorrow at 8am with Kindzia and c) any hope of getting my sleep schedule shifted so that I can be fresh on Saturday for the race to make best of a year worth of painful investment in fitness.

But really, with such a grand challenge given to me by the servers why should I care about Ironman? I live for challenge and I have it. So I'm happy, right?

Perspective? Yes, my life could be worse. My life is pretty grand compared to many. Or is it? When you don't care about anything... when you don't want to wake up... when you realize that nothing you do moves you any closer to a better life. Well, when that happens it's pretty bad. Because you've lost yourself. Because you've lost hope. And I have. Completely lost my desire to be alive. Completely lost my desire to create anything. Completely lost my desire to move forward.

Five years of kicks to the groin. Five years of horrible decisions that only tie me more tightly into this horrible life. Reducing my options. Preventing me from being me. Making it so that my only real option... the only responsible option... is to give up the things i care about in life and take care of the things that other people expect me to take care of. The things I've committed to doing.

And that's what you're witnessing right now, dear blog reader. Me having to decide to be awake to fix the servers when I'd much prefer to be asleep getting fresh for Ironman. My commitments and bad decisions have slowly taken over everything else and now they're taking over my final refuge of personal happiness... fitness in the form of Ironman training. So I'm rebelling. Getting mad. Saying stupid things. Acting childish. Because I don't want to be doing the responsible thing. I want to be doing the Ironman thing.

I know that when the commitments finally take over Ironman... and they will... that I'll be gone. I won't exist. I'll simply be a shell of what is already a shell of Joe Reger. Robotically doing what's expected of me.

Take this relationship with Grey Advertising. I love BA Albert. A few weeks ago somebody in her company calls up and they need a person for a meeting. I'm in a NYC taxi cab looking forward to nothing more than my bed when I get home, tired of fighting servers remotely and already exhausted. But hey, ok, it's just a meeting, right? Then two. Then I'm in charge of digital services. What?!? How did that happen? I don't want that. I just wanted to help a friend out for a meeting. Bad decisions on my part. I should have said no. So I'll gracefully exit that relationship tomorrow... at least this rant creates one good outcome. And the price for that good outcome for me will likely be that BA won't trust me to come through for her any more. Being a grown up sucks.

What happens when I realize that all I am is an endless series of commitments that I don't care about that don't improve my life one tiny little bit? Commitments that I can't back out of like I can back out of the Grey commitment. What becomes of me?

Right now I need to fix the servers. It's the only path. And that's the problem. Too much of my future is tied to the servers. I need to get the servers fixed to get the company going to pay the debts I owe. I can't take a job because even at a huge salary it'd take twenty years to pay down my debts. I can't start another company with a different idea because it'd take too long... I'm broke today. I can't, I can't, I can't.

What if I just walk away? What if I drive to Colorado tonight and get a job at a bar? Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? But what would happen? Nothing. I mean, I'd be cold because the fan in the minivan's heating system is broken, of course. I'd just go about my life serving drinks. People would lose faith in me. But who really cares? I guess I do.

I don't want the people who've invested time and money in me to lose out. So I'll just run my life into the ground and be miserable for another, what, five years? Ten years? This is why the 50's are the new 40's. We all make horrible decisions in our 20's and 30's and spend our 40's digging our sad way out.

The irony is that if I did drive to Colorado tonight I'd be me again and being me is much more likely to someday pay off my debts than being my robot self is. The real me has passion for many things in life. The real me has energy. The real me is creative. The real me enjoys failure because it teaches so much. The real me doesn't care what people think. And all of those things would eventually lead me to happiness. Somehow.

But right now I'm not me. I'm just a robot going about my business fixing a server. Man, I really screwed this life thing up.

Please don't comment on this post or send me an email or ever even mention it. I know you care. And your comments do usually help. But I'm inconsolable right now and honestly too embarrassed to deal with a comment proving you've actually read this. I'd much rather assume that you haven't.

And please don't think that when I'm around you I'm faking my enjoyment. I really do enjoy being around my friends and family because it takes me out of the misery that has become my life for short periods of time. In short, don't feel sorry for me. I'm an idiot and all of this is my own fault. I'll get over it.