75 Minutes

An hour & 15 minutes to go before my presentation. I can feel the back of my head & neck getting damp from sweat. Keep having to lift up my hair & wipe it off. I just hope the collar & back of my shirt aren't showing it.

Thing is am actually cold. Everyone is. It's always freezing in my office. Cold & sweaty. Yuck.

Whatever is wrong in the system now it's too late to fix it. When I think of all those people looking at me. Some of them have already arrived. People who come from a long distance always seem to arrive first. A couple I've known for a while - from other projects. They stopped by to say hello. One of them had his coffee with me. I kept wondering would he still be this friendly afterwards if the demo turned out to be full of run-time errors I missed & he's suing us for breach of contract?

There are literally hundreds of use cases. Have I covered all possible scenarios in the test cases? Can you ever think of all possible run-time errors? Have we done enough black-box testing? I mean we've got systems that have been running for years & new run-time errors are discovered in them after all this time. Some errors will only be found if someone uses the system in the manner that triggers them. And if the system has hundreds or thousands of 'manners of use' then that might happen after years or it might never happen. Or it might happen within the first 3 months which would be a MAJOR embarrassment for me & my organization. It might have consequences more serious than embarrassment. It's not fair really that someone whose system ran for a year before an error was discovered is considered more reliable than someone whose error was discovered after a month when it really is just luck.

Last night my dreams were full of white boxes & black boxes & bugs. Real-live crawling bugs. Not all crawling. Some of them flew. They were all over my office & my papers & my computer. They were coming out of the printers, the drawers, the filing cabinets. Even the ceiling was crawling with them. I wasn't in the office but somehow I could see them. And I was thinking I couldn't ever go back in there because they'll sting & they're all poisonous. My manager was yelling at me to clean up the office, put all the bugs back into the black & white boxes they apparently came from.

Was screaming in my sleep apparently. My husband woke me & told me but I couldn't remember screaming & I never heard myself. He held me & recited all my favorite Quranic verses & prayers. He gave me a massage. He went & got me a glass of juice. But I couldn't go back to sleep. In the end he asked me if I really felt like going back to sleep. I said no. Sleeping at times like this just means more nightmares. He said fine then we'll stay up. And we did. Until 6:30 this morning. Eating cold chicken & cheese & watching TV.