Friday, June 22, 2007

On Call, Day Four

Thursday was an uneventful day, punctuated by a visitor or two to our new office that Peder the Great calls "the dungeon". There was a little follow up, some admin duties (updating the on call contact list), and conversation...overall a bland day.

About 2:45 PM we received a call that our old nemesis, SAP, was acting up with one of the modules it runs. I quickly call the SAP team on call number and am told that it will be investigated. An hour went by and the ticket was not updated, nor was it assigned. Both my colleague/TL and I thought this was odd, so I called to ask for an undate. The young woman who answered told me that they saw the ticket but could not work on it until t was in their queue. It appeared to be in their queue but she informed me that it was in the L3 queue, not the L1/L2 queue. "Semantics", I think to myself but I do as she asked and move it to the other queue. Well, I did not move it, my TL did...I was on hold so long that my over full bladder (I drink a lot of water each day) begged to be emptied, so I put my phone on speaker and my TL chatted until I got back. This was right before I went home and prepped to go on call for the evening. Going on call also means following up on any issues that are outstanding at the end of business, so those on call need to get home and set up a VPN connection to continue working.

My trip home was graced by periods of heavy rain. I needed to stop and get gasoline (I was on vapors) as well as stop at the grocery store to get some sale items. I put 19 gallons into my 22 gallon tank and headed home to take care of the dogs and set up the PC for on call.

At 4:50 PM I got home and let the dogs out to do their business while I walked to the mailbox to see what bills were waiting. Happy to see only junk mail and coupons, I wiped the dogs down and let them back in to feed and water them.

At 4:55 PM I had my PC fired up and the VPN connection open. I logged onto Outlook and to OVSD and waited for my call. My TL called at 5:05 PM with good news. While the issue was not solved, the L2 tech could not find anything that would indicate a problem. All the SAP modules were running and there were no errors with the module my customer was concerned with. The customer was contacted but she did not have anything to submit to test with, so the Site Mgr was called. The Site Mgr agreed to put the ticket on hold until the morning.

With that bit of good news, I grabbed some quasi-Mexican food (cheese burritos and chips/salsa) and watched some TV. Being on call does not allow me to get into anything that cannot be stopped immediately so I am limited on what I can do...TV being the normal fall back option. However I grow weary of TV easily so I was soon bored.

I wanted until my wife came home and we chatted for a while then I started watching a Val Kilmer movie on My 27 called, "The Salton Sea", which started off kinda weird, but ended very well. I watched that until 9:00 PM and then we took a short walk with the dogs. Once we came back, I was not really into doing much, so my wife just listened to her mp3 players (singing along of course) while I browsed news and read e-mail. After 20 minutes or so, I killed the lights and hit the sack. I slept like a rock, straight through the night.

The following morning my routine went very smoothly and I was able to get all the things done I needed to do before I left, including bringing the cable management loom (to fix a rats nest of cables), WD-40 (to fix a squeaky desk drawer), and my Windows Vista DVD from home, as well as take out the recycleables. Go me!

No comments: