Thursday January 29th 2009. Launch -77 days.

Today has been one of those days when you start the day with a definite aim, but it seems to be incredibly hard to achieve it. Aim: finish the Test Plan for next week’s tests. It sounds simple. There are constant distractions though. People come in with questions. A diagram needs to be re-designed (and ended up being several hours work). The telephone. All in all, a normal day. In fact, with the Boss and our System Engineer away, it was actually a quieter and more relaxed day than many because there were fewer unexpected things to do. My end of the corridor houses the three of us who do most of the planning and administration and the secretary, which leads to a lot of spontaneous meetings during the day to discuss issues as they arise. Our System Engineer’s main contribution to my morning was an ominous e-mail promising me that I would be having fun tomorrow. The evil day is coming when I will start on the job training to become “Uplink Verification Coordinator” (it sounds better than “eye of the hurricane”). Actually, it will be fun (but please, don’t tell him that!) This will be probably the toughest assignment that I have ever had. Many is the time that I have gone home in the evening dog-tired, feeling as if my brain has been smashed flat with a mallet but, when you finally get on top of things and dominate them it is a great feeling: this is no routine 9-to-5 job and the huge challenge it implies gives huge satisfactions when the challenges are overcome.

Anyway, the inevitable happened. People had given me their inputs for the Test Plan. Most of them had to be edited and re-formatted. Some had to be edited and re-formatted a lot. Then the mistakes had to be cleaned-up and things tidied-up. Finally the report got sent out around about 1:30am, at which point I got on the stepper for 20 minutes and tiredly made up for missing two nights of exercise. There was, though, the satisfaction, when I got off the stepper, of a nice note from the Boss congratulating me on finally getting the report out: however little I sleep, he works more and sleeps less.

Tomorrow though is going to be a long day.