8:30 AM - Rush into work to get on a screen-share with some customer that is based out of India or Saudi Arabia or Australia, trying to chase the time differenc

8:30 AM - Rush into work to get on a screen-share with some customer that is based out of India or Saudi Arabia or Australia, trying to chase the time difference. 8:40 AM - Customer never joined conference call, grumble about the normal morning pre-work routine that's been disrupted for no reason. 9:00 AM - Make the mistake of checking email. Realize some customer has had a problem with our software. Details are sketchy at best. Compose an email asking for more information, log files, screenshots, a coherent description of the issue, anything. 10:00 AM - Boss rolls into work, starts checking his email. Torrent of emails sent out about status of half a dozen disparate projects and evaluations. Seizes upon possible customer issue, demands immediate all-hands meeting to discuss the problem, even though the customer has yet to provide any information. 10:30 AM - Pointless standup meeting. 11:00 AM - Customer with the problem proves themselves once more incapable of following directions, sends completely unrelated set of log files and screenshots. Still no description of what the problem was. Query for the correct information. 12:00 - Flee for lunch. 1:00 - Post-lunch coma. 1:30 - Try to actually knock out some tickets and get something done. 1:35 - Customer finally sends decent bug report with information that can be analyzed. Except they are running an ancient version and refuse to update. Pull down old version of software to cross-check logging information and reproduce issue. Realize issue was fixed a year and three point releases ago. Tell customer to upgrade, which will take three to six weeks to percolate through their lab, staging and finally production environments, amassing copious amounts of red tape along the way and requiring sign-off by no fewer than seven different groups. Prepare temporary work-around to quiet down the issue in the meantime. Get ambushed with three other issues that have been occurring for weeks but were never brought to attention. 4:00 - Free once more to try to squeak out some forward progress for the day. Get pulled into hall-way conversation about some terrible idea for a feature that somebody who was given a demo of the product idly asked for, and sales interpreted as a show-stopping, must-have, stop-the-sale, not-going-to-make-my-quota blocker. 4:55 - Fuggit, it's time to go home. Not all days are like this, but when you get into a stretch of them, whoo boy.