Earlier this month Steve Jones (b/t) suggested that it might be helpful if those of us that work in the IT/database field shared four random days out of our lives. Today wasn’t exactly normal, it was my first day back from a 10-day vacation, (Alaskan cruise. It was wonderful, thanks for asking.) but here we go

Before work

I get to work from home two days a week, of which today was one. Between this and the fact that school is out (usually I take the kids to school in the morning), I got to sleep in. Meaning I got up around 7am. Even though I’m working from home I still get up the same way. Shower, put on pants, etc. Then I took my daughter to camp, and back home to work. I ran late (happens a lot to me) and I wasn’t back to work till around 9.

Emails

The first thing I do each morning is catch up on emails. Some of my emails are associated with the work I’m doing, but most of them I just need to skim through. Alert spam, emails from and to other members of my team etc. So not including the emails actually related to my projects I usually spend half an hour or so a day. Today, obviously, wasn’t an overly normal day for me. Because it’s my first day back from a vacation I had 600+ emails (after hitting 30 different email rules to get rid of junk). I spent almost half the day catching up and now I’m down just under 200 left.

Meetings

Meetings range for me. Somedays I don’t have any, some I barely get bio breaks. Today was pretty light, only two meetings. One was a project status meeting for a particular application. Dozens of projects, just a single application. The other was a team meeting to review existing tickets that hadn’t been claimed yet, particularly the ones due today.

Answering questions

Over time I’ve developed a reputation in my office of being someone that people can go to to ask SQL Server questions. Today was a moderately slow day. Two permissions questions, a coding question (problem with an update), and researching what a job does (it was failing and we needed to figure out which team was responsible for it. Which can change on a daily basis.)

Watch the ticket queue

We take turns watching our ticket queue, making sure that the tickets have the information needed to perform, are written up correctly, belong to our team, etc. Today wasn’t my turn (usually I get Wed afternoons) but I spent a couple hours spelling a co-worker as he went to lunch.

Ticket work

I actually got to spend a few minutes working on a ticket! Still more to do tomorrow.

After work

Working from home today, so after work, I took that long 20 step trip from my work computer to my personal computer. Relaxed for a bit, helped my daughter with her cross stitch, etc. Then later I worked on writing this. Normally I write my blog posts over the weekend but I’m way behind so I had to get started early.