Waiting

One Street: Market Square, Shipley #17

I'm writing this on the train from Amsterdam to Roermond. It's not been the best of days - although I have been given a boost by the experience of an effect which I believe has a name (given by the writer Colin Wilson I think), but which completely escapes me at the moment.

I was having all sorts of problems with the new software this morning, last minute changes having knocked various things out, feeling very fed up with the whole business and having no idea how to prioritise too many things that need to be done in far too little time. Then an email arrives detailing a potentially very serious security problem with one of our live systems. It made no sense at all but screenshots were sent which couldn't be argued with. It was beyond weird. A suggestion that something had happened which should simply be quite impossible. Explanations were being demanded. It felt like the final straw.

With the help of my colleagues we spent half an hour doing some detective work, spoke to the user concerned, and managed to work out the unlikely sequence of events which gave rise to the strange behaviour. There was an underlying logic (which there always is) and the problem actually proved not to be a problem at all, although it certainly looked like it and the user cannot be blamed for making some false assumptions and jumping to the wrong conclusion.

The point is that when we resolved the issue I was so relieved that I suddenly found myself on a high. In reality, I was just back where I was, with the same problems with the new software, and having lost an hour of valuable time too, but my bad mood had lifted and I was in a much better position to cope! Does anyone out there know the name given to this effect?

Since arriving in the hotel here in Roermond, things have gone sour again. Although my colleagues could get on the internet I was singularly unable to. It's taken me over two hours fiddling around in Windows to sort the problem out. It really shouldn't be this hard. That actually included the whole hour it took from when I decided I needed to reboot my laptop until I was able to use it again! This blip is kind of appropriate in the circumstances. The waiting was interminable. Like it was for all the people waiting for buses this morning as the traffic ground to a halt following a fresh inch of snow during the night.