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an Oracle lesson
Saturday, February 5 2000
I woke up this morning at the usual weekday time with the usual weekend hangover. Actually, this particular hangover was an especially bad one, filled with all the usual hangover regrets from the night before. I hoped I hadn't said or done anything too stupid. From what I recalled of it, my altercation with Kim had gone pretty badly and I hoped I hadn't been too mean to her. But it was still true that Kim had left me no car to drive to work and not only had I left my bicycle Downtown, but this morning just happened to be one of those freak rainy ones that happen three times a year. None of this would have mattered save for the fact that today I intended to attend an Oracle PL/SQL lesson being taught at my workplace.
So I smoked some pot and caught the bus. On the Old Town-Downtown leg of the ride, there were a couple of blind women on the bus, and one of them had a seeing eye dog, a businesslike black Labrador Retriever. The conversation between the blind women was mostly about the dog, what to do when inconsiderate people distract him from his job, what needs to be done when a dog develops a behavioral problem and must be sent back for "a refresher." As we approached the stop where the women would be getting off, the dog suddenly snapped to attention and began pulling towards the door. Obviously he knew the ultimate destination and wanted to be sure that his mistress would not be missing her stop.
Today's PL/SQL lesson was being taught by the Hare, a big Brahman bull of an Indian on loan from Oracle. Were it not for his childish whimsy and broken English, the material he covered today would have been agonizingly dull. Given the intensity of my hangover and the psychotropic paint smell wafting in through the ventilation system, the day amounted to relentless torture. But I endured almost all of it.
On one particularly adventurous toilet break, I found myself trapped in the stair well on the 17th floor. I climbed upward, trying to find a door back into the building, but they were all locked, all the way up to floor 25. So I ended up having to go all the way downstairs in order to re-enter the building. I didn't know it at the time, but all this up and down stair exercise left my calf muscles in a terrible state.
At the end of the day, I got a ride back to my house in Kevin the DBA's SUV, as driven by a contingent of senior developers from the acquired Austin-based company (friend's of Kevin's). Kevin himself was leading the way on his unnecessarily noisy motorcycle. In the aftermath of Friday night, he'd had to leave his principle transportation Downtown as well. As Kevin was helping me unload my bike from his SUV, a freak accident happened and my right hand suddenly shot up under the rear fender, slicing off a thin layer of skin about the size of a match stick. It was such a thin layer of skin that it never actually bled, it just wept clear fluid for hours afterwards.
I was so weak with hangover that I went to bed at around 8pm.
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