bah humbug
bah humbug
I don’t like mercury retrograde. I didn’t believe in astrology for a long time. Weird superstitious mumbo jumbo. But then people started telling me that “ooh, mercury is retrograde, don’t start a new job”, or “I got in a huge fight with my sweetie. It sure is hard when mercury is retrograde”.
I can still remember the day, the MOMENT when I realized that i still didn’t believ, but I thought I could tell. A little setup: It was 1997, I was working at SSDS. It was a monday just before xmas. We’d had some kind of network craziness the previous night where all the routers had some kind of packet storms. I’m not sure if anything was ever determined to be the cause.
That day, one of my co-workers who usually worked in Colorado Springs came to the Denver office to work ons something related to the company website. When he arrived, the folks from HR he came to see didn’t know why he was there, didn’t know anything about the project. We found somthing mildly useful for him to do, and when he tried to leave, his car wouldn’t start, and wouldn’t even take a jump. he ended up needing a ride from his sister, and had to fix his car another day.
When I went to leave, I discovered that my tire was low. Prudently driving over to the 7-11 next to my work, I pulled up to the pump, got out, closed the door to the car, and put air in my tires. Only then did I notice that I had left the car running and that the keys were now locked in the car. Fortunately for me, my, the 7-11 and my girlfriend’s work were all within walking distance of each other, so as I was walking over to her work to get keys, I realized I”d had this kind of “everything is going wrong” feeling before, when people said that Mercury was retrograde. As I was walking, I realized that this astrological event was again occurring. After I got the keys, walked back, I went to a search engine (probably alta vista in those days) and typed in “mercury retrograde” and discovered that mercury had indeed gone retrograde the night before, at about the time that the network was going crazy. Damn, maybe there is somehting to this astrology thing.
At that job i eventually was asked to put mercury retrogrades on the department calendar because we just found that it wasn’t such a good idea to do system upgrades, etc while this was happening. It was just easier to schedule around it. Severl coworkers at my current job have bought into the idea because our ticket loads have pretty consistently followed the retrograde schedule.
So I mention all of this because Mercury is once again retrograde for the next few weeks. Google ‘mercury retrograde’ and read a couple articles if this is the first you’ve heard of it, Meantime, don’t start any new jobs, or relationships, or businesses in the next few weeks. Retrograde time can be a good time to finish old unfinished business, however.