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3AM Me

For the most part, my job doesn't require me to be up late at night. It's pretty rare these days that I have to be logged on to my work machine once I get home. Sure, I interact with people in other parts of the world, but for the most part, we can get it all done within the confines of our regular business hours. That said, a very coincidental set of circumstances has made me decide that I can't wait until the next time that I do have to be awake for this.

The first part of this story starts with a work snippet. I support an application that gets used at all hours of the day, and one day, we started seeing intermittent errors in the middle of the night. They just started at 3AM for no apparent reason, even though no one had changed anything (at least not that I'm aware of). The worst part was that they were intermittent errors, so it became much harder to reproduce the errors or troubleshoot what was going on.

Regardless, someone suggested I check the credentials, since that was a problem in the past. Now, this is probably not the best of suggestions, because the user name stays the same and the password stays the same. If it works some of the time, you want to look for something that doesn't stay constant throughout the whole process. Otherwise, it should work all of the time (or none of the time). So, that led to the following conversation with a buddy of mine:

Me: "About the only way that'd happen is if I logged in at 3AM to change the password. And then logged back in a couple of hours later to change it back."
Friend: "I wouldn't put it past you."
Me: "Yeah, 3AM Sam is a real jerk."
Friend: "That's what I hear."

This friend sure does like to mess with me, no? But still, I was pretty amused by the notion of logging in to work in the middle of the night just to wreak a little havoc. That's part of the reason why I remember this exchange; I could BE the chaos monkey.

Not two days later, the Mild Girlfriend was telling me about a dream she had where I was critiquing other people's form for squats. Apparently, dream Sam is also a jerk. In my defense, she said that the subconscious thought was along the lines of me emphasizing form on the CrossFit blog I help to maintain. Or maybe she was just trying to be kind about dream Sam's jerk tendencies. Either way, the timing was too perfect. Given the exchange about work, this immediately made me laugh. I'm talking about the good, hearty kind of the laugh, the kind that comes from your belly.

After I explained why this was so funny to the slightly confused Mild Girlfriend, it more or less stuck. 3AM Sam is a jerk.
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