Stuck in a rut

Some World of Warcraft stuff again and some work stuff. :)

I've been stuck at level 23 forever it seems.

Well, I shouldn't complain; levels 21 and 22 came very easily and quickly. I thought I was stuck at level 20, too. So once the momentum builds up, I'll start progressing again. In the meanwhile, allow me to bitch and moan that I've spent two or three days on the same level.

I've got to take the time to reorganize my game toolbar. I just fear doing it because I know for the first couple of battles I'm going to be so screwed up. For a fairly delicate, non-armor-wearing class, seconds wasted trying to find the right offensive spell can mean the difference between life and a long walk from the graveyard in an incorporeal state trying to find your corpse.

---------------------------------------

At work, I'm stuck at a rut, too.

I'm correctly calling a stored SQL procedure from my ASP, but the execute causes an error. I'm pretty sure the problem is on the database side, but the DBA was unresponsive all day. It's almost 24 hours and she hasn't even acknowledged my mail. ::sigh:: And the demo is on Friday.

If I got this to work, it would cause a cascading effect where I could almost instantaneously get a bunch of other customer-desired features to work, but this first step is KEY.

My stomach is not happy with the stress.

--------------------------------------

So my virtual life and my actual professional life are driving me crazy during the little bit of real life I have squeezed in between the two.

This latest bump is a rare event at my current position. The company is laid back, for the most part the stress-level is low to non-existent, and they pay me well. It's terrible that I'm not more grateful. But, gawd, I am so bored. Everything revolves around finance and there's never any change in the topic! At the Evil Empire, I worked on a variety of projects, so if one project bored me, I could work on the next for a while. Here, there is but one topic to rule us all, one topic to bind us.

What I really miss is commercial work, which pushed me and made me stretch creatively. Weird, I was underpaid for being brilliant, and now I'm well-paid to be mediocre. The bar is pretty low here.

Conceivably, I could do what my co-worker (and former Evil Empire co-worker) is doing, that is, be content with my lot in life and stay where the work is never too hard, the pace is never pushed, continue to receive my yearly (and admittedly generous) bumps in salary, and stay with the company until I retire.

There are days when I can see this is a sensible plan.

There are days when I think I will go insane if I stay.

Justifiably annoyed

Okay, so I have spent DAYS on this problem, finally commenting out ALL of my code and uncommenting each line one by one to see what was causing the error.

Early on, I found some stupid typoes on my part. I cop to those. I did those. But I caught those all on the first day.

My logic was correct. My methodology was correct. And my conclusion was correct: the problem was on the database side.

I wasted days in down-time trying to get something to work that was hosed on the other end.

ARGH! On the bright side, now it's all a cakewalk. On the other side, though, that means I'm gonna be pulling all-nighters to get the features integrated ASAP.