For what it's worth, it's 23:30 here, and I'm on my laptop working on making sure that our internal ikiwiki is up-to-date with notes on the labs that I support. I'm going in for surgery on Thursday, and I've got Wednesday off (it's bowel surgery, so I'm doing all the annoying prep the day before). I also need to post on the appropriate Slack channels, so that my co-workers (who will be covering for me) know the docs are up-to-date. I also need to note anything things that might pop up, that don't justify wiki entries (like, tickets of note that are still open).

I'll probably work until Midnight or 00:30, and then pick right up at it tomorrow morning, because _I want the docs to be up-to-date_. I was working on all that today and yesterday, but there was also the regular support load from my labs. Plus, one of my co-workers was stuck in a project to reverse-engineer a binary file format, and I was helping her through using the Python `struct` module for the first time. It would be nice if we had an extra employee to help shoulder the load, but he's out right now (his wife was in labor).

My clients don't want to spend time managing technology. They just want to do the stuff they love, to do their research. But things like broken servers, laws, hackers, and the threat of negative PR, get in the way. I try to deal with all of that for them.

I'm a staffer at a university. I already knew that some portion of the student body thought of us as parasites[1], but I didn't know that the outside world held the same view.

[1]: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is...