Chapter 6: The Weekday Grind
“So, the customer called and was very happy with your fix this morning, Davie,” my boss Jaime said. “What did it turn out to be?”
“Their backups weren’t complete, so although I did everything they asked us to do for them last night, we couldn’t see that there was a problem until they turned everything on together at the site this morning. I had to go online and download half a dozen programs and install them in a rush to get everything back in order.”
“Ugh…people don’t test backups.”
“No, not usually. I dropped a hint that they should consider a drive snapshotting setup, so if you give them a call after the lunch rush, I think you’ll be able to make a quick sale,” I reported.
“Awesome, Davie, you rock.”
I don’t believe he really thinks that of me, but he seems happy enough to keep paying me, so that’s good. He’s just that sort of person, an ego stroker, which is why he’s the extrovert boss, and I’m not. Works for me. I went into the back room to start knocking out some of the small jobs we’d shelved yesterday due to the emergency.
Since I’d had a late breakfast on my way into the office after finishing with the customer, I pushed lunch until 2pm, by which time I’d been on the clock for seven and a half hours. That’s close enough to a full day’s work for Moab, especially after last night and the early emergency wake-up call. I got on my bike, grabbed a lunch to go at a little place I know off the main drag that doesn’t charge tourist prices, put it in my trunk bag and took off out of town to the North to eat my lunch beside the river and get some nature time in.
Moab is in a kind of broad, flat valley with red sandstone mesas lining the town to either side and the town’s Main Street going roughly down the middle between them. That makes Moab a long, narrow town with not much commercially going on off the main drag. It’d be an exaggeration to say that it’s all residential one block off of Main, but that’s the broad feel of the place. It’s a great town for quiet side-street paths from one place to another. You can ride a bike on Main Street if you want to, but you’ve got to be paying sharp attention. All that tourist traffic will squash you flat if you get sloppy out there, especially the traffic just passing through who were doing 65–70 mph just minutes ago; unlike the locals, they are expecting highway rules, so they don’t look out for bicyclists. It’s better to stick to back streets until you get out of town center, where the highway gets a proper bike lane.
The North route out of town takes you over the Colorado on a nice new bridge they built several years ago. I like to pop down a red dirt trail off one side of that bridge and take it down the river a ways, far enough to get away from the highway noise. There’s still a lot of people stomping around this area, mostly tourists, with the occasional raft floating by, so I can’t strip off during the daytime and properly reconnect to nature, but I can at least relax out of sight of civilization and take my shoes off. I can’t do much magic barefoot, but I can trickle-charge my mojo batteries that way. My reserves were still topped up from last night, but I need more than just magical recharging. It was time to go out and just…be.