Well, things aren't going quite so well as I had hoped. They started out awesome -- I had (just about) finished my
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=88.8)
csi_bigbang fic, I had a summer internship that not only was in my field of study but was also getting me college credit, I had found a decently-cheap place to live.
And then things got not-so-awesome very quickly.
I work for a software development company that has developed a piece of software that is, pretty much, an all-in-one asset management application for the mining and construction industry. Pretty cool stuff. I got a job with them doing half development, half support.
As a support person I was paired with two programmers who are the main support people for Tanzania. Cool biz. Then something big happened -- I can't go into details because of the non-disclosure agreement -- but the entire Tanzania support team had to fly out forthwith. (And by "the entire team" I mean the entire full-time team; that is, not me.)
Then the unthinkable happened: one of the guys got very sick and was hospitalized. And since big emergencies half the globe away don't really disappear on their own, I was pretty much called up in the middle of the night, asked if I had an up-to-date malaria vaccine, and told there was a plane ticket waiting for me the next day.
OK cool. Tanzania, exotic, right? Yeah, no internet. In my rush to leave I totally forgot to submit my
csi_bigbang fic, much to my chagrine. I didn't remember until we had left Johannesburg and civilization, and were on the chartered turboprop on our way to Dar es Salaam. Not, of course, that I could do anything about it: due to weight restrictions on the luggage, I had only brought my corporate laptop with me.
But I talked to the mods and that was OK, because I was going to get back to the US on Monday 15 June.
But this being me, and me being such good friends with Murphy, it didn't quite turn out that way. So we took the turboprop back to Johannesburg, and just as we're landing we get a frantic call from the mine foreman: they just had a catastrophic failure, and their entire server setup has just been completely wiped out.
So we get
back on the stupid little plane that I'm really starting to hate at this point, go back to Tanzania, requisition new servers, rebuild the entire system from a week-old backup, and then spend the rest of the time fixing everything. And by everything I mean pretty much updating by hand every single aspect of this highly complex software.
Finally we board the turboprop for the last time and keep our fingers crossed all the way to Johannesburg. Then the interminable Johannesburg-Frankfurt-Denver flight -- and let me tell you, 28 hours across three continents sure as hell qualifies as "interminable" -- and I am
finally home.
Just in time to find an email from the Big Bang mods: sorry, it's too late to accept a submission from you; maybe next year.
Great. I think I just want to lay down and sleep for a year.
The final versions of the CSI Big Bang fics are due in on June 28. I'll start posting my completed fic here, at
FanFiction.Net, and at
CSI-Forensics. (Not to mention a half-dozen different fanfiction communities here on LJ. Yay for ficspam.)
So yes, my most sincere apologies to
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=88.8)
micki_malheur, my assigned beta.
