Sixteen Tons And What Do You Get?

So yesterday completed over two weeks of time intensive tasks at work. Starting a couple of weekends back I pretty much have been at work every day for long hours. I did manage to take a half day this past Wednesday and a full day on Thursday to try and recuperate for the testing that lasted NINETEEN HOURS IN A ROW on Friday.

While not everything went as smooth as everyone would have liked my team and I executed superbly on a really complex set of tasks. We basically did a rehearsal for launch day where we set up our satellite as if it was sitting on top of the rocket. We step through setting up and verifying all the important systems required to keep the sucker safe and alive on its journey from Earth to orbit. Ultimately we need to get our duration down to under 10.5 hours, but this run, which took 15, was already 4 hours better than our first try. Put it this way if we hadn't had the problems we did I have no doubt we would have been done in nine hours or less. My team is that good. As it was the problems that occurred helped us better plan for crap that could happen on the real day.

It was long day and I wasn't all that excited while it was going on. There is lots of interaction between our launch and mission control teams and there can be a lot of dead time waiting for someone else to do there bit and move to the next step. At the end of the day though looking back on all that had gone right and gone wrong I was really excited about how our team worked together as a team to solve those problems and stay focused on the task at hand. We'll have a bunch more rehearsals, not soon thank dog, and I can only see us getting better and better. It's days like yesterday that keep me coming back to this damn job.

So now since I worked so many hours last week I have a choice. I can either go in to work next week and every hour I work will be overtime. Or I can take the 80 hours I've already worked in basically a week just stay the hell away.

I'm opting for the second choice. :)