i love how that stuff always happens when you're on vacation. last christmas, i was off on vacation and the backup hard drive (just an extra big drive that we used for doing additional quick and dirty backups to) in the webserver died and brought the machine down. fixing it was a simple matter of removing the drive and booting in single user mode to manually change some of the services that were hanging because they couldn't find that drive. not a big deal, but a little more difficult when you have to walk a unix-illiterate coworker through the process on the phone.

the worst part was that right before i left for vacation, we'd gotten a new server. i'd just gotten it configured but didn't dare deploy it right before leaving for vacation.

then the last time i went on vacation, the entire northeast US had a blackout. we only ever have downtime or hardware problems when i leave. i think the servers miss me when i'm gone and are just acting out in anger.

i'm really scared because i'm planning on going to japan for christmas and new year's this year.