Every year, some buffoon trots out the idea of doing away with today’s holiday (which is probably only a holiday for state and federal workers, but, hey, since I’m one of those I aint gonna complain). I have no real affection for Columbus (other than I kind of get a kick out of celebrating somebody who thought he was in India and gets credited for discovering a place where people were already living and where the Vikings were already playing football some 500 years before him), but we need more holidays around here, not fewer. So if you want to rename it “Native American Day” or something (think of the irony in that one – not to mention the holiday sales event on cigarettes and a free spin at the slots) that’s fine – just don’t take my day off away.

Personally, I like to think of this as the kickoff to the end of year non-productivity season, which really doesn’t start to ramp up until we approach Thanksgiving (yet another day of irony for those of native descent). Usually about a week out from T-Day, people (especially those with kids) start taking days off making it blessedly impossible to schedule meetings. After Thanksgiving, there are seemingly daily holiday parties, more vacation time, and of course people trying to hawk their kids’ boy scout popcorn or pawning off raffle tickets for some do-gooder event or other.

Basically, the only thing that really goes on between Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl is that people sit around and think of things the DBA and Server guys need to do. URGENTLY (and at the last minute)! Typically things they’ve twiddled their thumbs over for months and then it’s “oh, by the way, we a serve set up and a database installed on it by tomorrow.”

This is what you get when you have non-IT people running IT projects. They seem to think that it’s better to hire people with clinical experience for IT jobs (because you can teach any moron how to do IT type things) than to get people who have at least some technical background. You know, the people whose résumés typically include “proficient in Microsoft Office” (and even that is usually a lie).

Oh well, today is “close the pool” day (always a sad moment). I usually do this a bit earlier in the year (like, mid to late September), but this year I wanted to let the water get nice and cold (under 60) first, so hopefully we’ll have less to do when we open it back up again. Guess I better get another cup of coffee and then get busy.