Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng

Let me tell you a little bit about working in I.T. at (company name deleted to comply with non-disclosure agreement).
Like any job, I've got stuff to do. This stuff falls into categories based on priority. Priority is based on a few different qualities, the key being how important the person yelling about it is.
I think I've finally determined the way this complex resource scheduling is accomplished.
Somewhere in the building is a giant wheel with some legitimate I.T. projects written on it in black Sharpie. Also, management pet projects, the latest tech concerns from the internet, and some stuff that seems to be from some kind of online random word generator (Mad Libs, maybe?) are stuck to the wheel on brightly colored Post-It! notes.
Once every four hours or so, someone spins the wheel and flings a dart to determine what we in I.T. are late in delivering.
At no time are we allowed to look at the wheel beforehand.
Yesterday at around 4pm, it was decided that the monthly maintenance we have been prepping for all week would be cancelled in favor of completely changing directions and geographically splitting the team.
One of us (the guy whose wife could seriously go into labor any second) will stay here and turn off the power while the rest of us are to pack up our families and relocate for an undisclosed amount of time to a motel in Scottsdale, Arizona. Why? Hurricane Dean.
I spent most summers growing up on the gulf coast. The thought of running from a storm makes me feel "yellow".
Never mind that our house is right at the place people on our part of the Texas coast evacuate to, I've got to arrange for the cats to get fed, the fish to get watered and our home to be less looted than it would probably be otherwise. If there is time to design an elaborate series of traps a la Home Alone, I'll be sure to also set up a web cam.
While in Scottsdale, my co-worker and I will power up our Disaster Recovery environment and ensure that it continues to provide business-critical functionality in a cost-effective and 99.99% available manner.
The decision to ship us to Scottsdale was made in a meeting which never appeared on my Outlook Calendar. This pisses me off more than I can accurately describe.
So, I'm expected to put my kid in daycare in Scottsdale. The company will pay for it, but I haven't seen the complete analysis of the options for daycare or even a list of ones to avoid since they were profiled on 60 Minutes.
Shana has stuff to do next week. It is important stuff, so she can't evacuate with us.
I think we leave Sunday, unless Dean stalls, but I'm not invited to the meetings where this will be decided either.
Holy crap if I weren't so addicted to living indoors I'd quit right freaking now.
I've been informed that (even though my time that could be spent completing the Disaster Recovery environment will be wasted accounting for every possible disbursement of my family and personal life) if the DR isn't ready by Monday I could end up unemployed. The same threat has been made to everyone, and I checked with HR to assure myself that they have no candidates waiting in the wings to provide the ability to follow through on the threat, but it still adds to the growing list of things I'm using to justify resetting my homepage to Monster.com.
Further, I've gotten no submissions for a slogan (at least none I can have displayed without risking Blogspot suspending my account), so the banner project is not progressing as well as it should. People, only you can do something about this now. The future of the Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng banner rests firmly in your web browser of choice.
Just look it over and sum up the blog. You know you want to.