It's my second night doing the quarter-end monitoring. I managed to get a day's worth of sleep today, thus shifting my agony away for a bit. It's 4:00 in the morning, and I'm sitting quietly in the war room, watching nothing happen. There are three other people in here, and they apparently need noise to stay awake and alert. They are all mainframe people, which means they're old. One could draw the conclusion by going the other way too. They're old, which means they're most likely mainframe people.

Anyway, being old, they have daytime obligations like children, large cars, clothes shopping, or something else similarly unlikely that someone young would have. In whatever case, I'm guessing they were only able to get a couple hours' sleep. Therefore, they need things to keep them awake.

I would love to read a bit, or watch some of these TNG episodes I have on my hard drive, but the volume is turned all the way up for a movie that's being played on the big screen.

One hour left.