In December I had one ball in the air. Juggling with a single ball is quite easy, after all, as long as I keep my eye on it. In January I added a second ball. Cash has been short here so I started talking to some friends about contract work. By February we added a third ball, a contract job. Now it’s the end of February and suddenly I’ve added two new balls but get to stop searching for contract work so dropped one. That’s a total of four balls now in the air. Things are getting much more complicated.

And then yesterday happens. I’m about to step into a team meeting to discuss timing and priorities when I get a call from a partner. Can you bring that test server back up again so we can finalize the requirements for a project we have been talking about for a few months? Sure! I say. These folks have been great partners and figured it would take an hour or so to get it running.

Ten hours later I got the server up.

The details aren’t important, just know it had to do with a version of Linux that apparently is no longer supported, although that really shouldn’t matter when recovering from a backup. What is important is that failure in the system can happen at any time, or as Murphy might have said, it is bound to happen when you least need it to.

It’s all fine. I’ve gotten better at not letting chaos annoy me. (Amazingly my ability to handle chaos improved once I had kids.) But it is inevitable.