Man of constant sorrow

No, I’m not depressed.  I just have the song stuck in my head.  If you have seen “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” you probably know what I’m talking about.

I arrived home from work Monday night with plans to spend a quiet evening playing EQ2 and do some studying.  I’m currently working on upgrading some of my certifications and have picked up some rather large and intimidating computer books.  I can’t read them in large blocks of time because, well, they are boring as hell, so I try to do a bit here and there periodically throughout the day.  Only way I can take it.

So, I had just finished cooking some dinner and was sitting down to eat when my phone rings.  I answer and one of my co-workers, in a too damn cheerful voice, asks, “What to take a road trip tomorrow?”

We’re in the middle of our yearly PC upgrade push.  For the larger sites, two of us go.  Originally, I was scheduled for yesterday’s trip, but my boss changed that on Monday.  He decided that he wanted to get out of the office again and he was going to be the second man on all of these trips.

My understanding of what happened is the conversation went like this:

Co-Worker: Ready for tomorrow?
Boss-man: Yeah.  What time you want to leave?
Co-worker: Well, it’s 3-hour drive, so I was thinking we would leave at 6.
Boss-man: 6!!!  As in AM?!?  Hell no.  Call <insert my name here> and tell him he’s going afterall.

So, my day began yesterday at 4:15 in the morning.  I was at the office by 5 loading PC’s.  We pulled out of the parking lot at 5:45.  We arrived at our destination right around 9.  We started working our way through the building around 9:01.  At noon, we realized we still had a lot of work to do AND a 3-hour return drive, so we decided to skip lunch.  Around 3:30, we started to regret skipping lunch as the lack of food was making that ladder even more rickety than usual while running some new network drops.  At 5:30, we finished loading our gear back into the van.  At 5:45, we sat down to eat some Chinese (food, not people).  At 6:15, we were back in the van and heading home.  At 9:20, we pulled into the parking lot back here at the office.  By 10, we had finished unloading the van.  By 10:20, I was home.  By 10:21, I was in bed.

Sorry for the silence yesterday. 

“But, what does any of this have to do with ‘Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?’ and the song ‘Man of constant sorrow?’”

Oh, that.

As we were driving down the road yesterday, my buddy pulls out an MP3 player, rigs it into the car stereo and fires it up.  Man of constant sorrow was the first song on his playlist and it’s been stuck in my head since then.

So now you know.