I used this opportunity to refactor some test data gen programs. Was going to merge three separate programs into one. That would decrease future maintenance a lot. The code was written in Oracle PL/SQL with hard coded tables and columns. I figured it was time to turn this code into some dynamic SQL where I could plug in appropriate tables.
Spent a week and a half refactoring the code. Did all the work on a virtual machine because that is where my best tools were. Last Friday, the machine was acting weird. I could only access my Visual Studio program. Nothing else in Windows would come up. I rebooted the machine at the end of the day.
Monday morning came around. I could not log in. Tried to contact the customer help desk. Spent all afternoon on hold. Got up early Tuesday. Was able to speak to the help desk. The technician seemed confused and could not resolve my problem. Issue was escalated to second tier help desk.
Later on I found out a couple other developers lost access to their virtual machines. Apparently they pushed some "Data Loss Prevention" software to our machines. The software install must have been super buggy. It corrupted all our virtual machines. I lost all my work for the last two weeks.
Worst part is now I don't have a virtual machine to do my work on. I need to rely on my laptop and shell access to a Solaris UNIX server. Ouch. I told my boss I am not that productive in this environment. I started out using Windows Notepad. But I recalled that I had NotePad++ from a prior project installed. A bit better. But I work best in Visual Studio.
The only upside is that I love database programming. So I just got two more weeks of heavy work in my favorite environment. Schedule is not looking too good though.
