In my organization we have ‘critical’ incidents. That means that something really bad broke, and that a sort of ‘all hands on deck’ message gets sent to all of our blackberries. Being in IT, it’s not really all that uncommon for things to go wrong now and then. In an average week it’s common to see one. If we have three or four, that’s unusually bad.

A few minutes ago we just got alert #12 for this week. Over the weekend we had a Patch Window, which is always also busy. Last week, before the window, we had five.

I’ve been sheltered from a lot of the worst of it by being in training, though I did still get a 4am wakeup call in my hotel to take care of one of them. Yesterday Microsoft also announced a critical vulnerability they were patching. Our security teams decided to patch our QA and Development servers now, but not production (my realm) until an exploit was found in the wild. About half an hour ago, a worm was found. So now my weekend is gone to assist in getting all of our servers patched.

My manager has been suffering near-daily migraines. I’ve had a stress-related tension headache that hurts behind my eyes. Other members of the team are experiencing mystery maladies as well. It’s killing us.

All of us.