Early Morning Routine:Earlier this year, my company went out and purchased a top-of-the-line water purifier for the office. Us hapless employees were thrilled. We get such few perks and the thoughts of a water purifier that could dispense both cold and hot water would be marveled. Especially those of us in IT who could use some warm beverages when spending a great deal of our day in an unbelievably cold computer room listening to a multitude of servers buzzing so loud we begin to get an early onset of tinnitus.
In the end, the thing sucks. I just spent my morning, like most mornings when I am in the office, cleaning water off of the floor because no beverage container can fit in the space provided without it shooting outward or hitting the rim of the container and then hitting the floor. We had someone out to look at it twice and they tweaked it and modified it and, in the end, still sucks. Last week I overheard a coworker wail in pain while scorching hot liquid struck him in a feeble attempt to make hot chocolate.
There were four of us at one point looking up at the spout wondering if by chance it was bent or if there was some foreseeable reason that it could not properly dispense water without causing a stream on the floor or causing third degree burns. In the end, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason.
Begin Coding:
Everything is going well, the JavaScript that I wrote to catch bad e-mails seems to be working, my ColdFusion is placing the proper credentials into the needed databases and the 2010 security upgrade is almost complete. Since it is the holliday's, most of the IT staff is out of the office and I gladly (I use the word lightly) offered to pick up the slack. Which leads to, first call of the morning...
Coworker: "I'm working from home and my wireless connection stopped working so I plugged directly into the router and now my e-mail doesn't work."
Me: "Does anything else work? Can you get on the Internet?"
Coworker: "Yes, I am on Yahoo! right now."
Me: "Can you access the file server?"
Coworker: "No."
Me: "Can you access the Web site."
Coworker: "Yes, I was in e-mail and then lost my connection and switched to the cable connection."
Me: "That's technologically impossible to make a difference since the e-mail server is in the computer room less than five feet from where I am sitting. You making changes at home cannot do it. I will go take a look."
Sure enough, file server and e-mail server were down and needed to come back up. I am going with coincidence because, in the end, it is still impossible for a user to bring down the server by a loss of connection.
However, I downed the locked up server without warning the world. My phone began ringing incessantly with coworkers who couldn't print or access shared drives. I told them that I had to down the e-mail and file server because they were locked up and I couldn't access the control prompt, etc. They told me that I should have sent an e-mail (which would have been impossible since THE E-MAIL SERVER WAS LOCKED UP!!!) I told them that we would be down a maximum of four minutes (it came back up in three) and all was once again right in the world.
I went back to coding. Completed the 'Answer your security question' portion of the new security system (which surprisingly almost coded itself). My water is empty but I am not even going to think about that right now. The IT line has been ringing off of the hook and just had to walk a user through typing in their password because they were spelling their last name wrong. Also, just got a message from AT&T that they were planning on servicing our T-1 lines this afternoon since they were noticing periodic outages (which explains the down file and e-mail servers). Decided to take a ten minute break and write this. It is going to be a great day!
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