God bless Texas. I wish the remaining 200 sane people in the state would leave so the fucking nutcases can just have the place.

Don't look at me. I'm just here to understand who I am.

Work shifted a little bit on Tuesday when I essentially had my mentor's job dropped on me. I'd expected to cover for a month or so when he goes on paternity leave, and I'd expected to take over those responsibilities over the coming couple of years, but some combination of his needing to offload stuff before he goes insane, and my apparently overwhelming competence, led to a decision to hand it over to me ahead of schedule, with him backing me up. Which he is, and it's working okay so far; a little warning might have been nice.

Did I mention I made a change on Tuesday to fix a bug, and I not only broke the build, but brought down two or three of our automated build machines, since the error was repeating and creating 45-gigabyte log files? It was mostly a fault in the third-party software, but still, maybe not the most auspicious beginning.

See, I (now) own our database proxy. Rather than every application doing database stuff differently, whenever other applications want data from our database, they ask my database proxy, which fetches it from the database and returns it to them in a standardized format that any operating system and programming language can parse. This is the Right and Proper Way of things; but it means that everything in the company depends on the database proxy, and people get cranky very fast if something goes wrong. Of course, I just completed a five-week course of major changes, plunging right ahead without really knowing what the previous behavior of the software was (though with everything checked over by my co-worker); and so of course, things are going wrong, and people are cranky.

Which. You know. Tough cookies.

Another level of challenge, this one.