There must be a Murphy-like law for this. Whenever creativity, development, and other forward-progress are at their best, a maintenance issue pops up and puts everything on hold while it demands attention.
I’m fixing–or at this point, still troubleshooting–quality issues that have suddenly come up on my main line at home. It is an IAX2 trunk, and suddenly it’s noisy, jittery, a big mess. Network seems clean, but it seems like the Internet is eating voice packets. What happened? The logs are puzzling, and even with a very bright fellow at the other end of the trunk, it’s not working. Repair time.
As a systems administrator (speaking of my job now, though I tend to be a systems admin at home, too), my first priority is to fix what is broken. Things break right when I have some creativity going in another area. Time to refocus the creativity from development to troubleshooting. Sometimes a creative repair is almost as good as a creative design. But never as good.