On Call, Day Two

Yesterday was an interesting day overall. I completed my report on the case I opened and closed and my TL and I kicked around ideas regarding to a problem that a third party to our customer was having. The end result of that was rather amusing...we found that the problem was caused by our customer (inadvertently of course) and now they have to work with the TP (third party) to correct it. The error was something akin to "go head and delete that info, you will not need it anymore" and the info that the TP was told to delete was the current info, not the outdated one. The issue lingered until I went home to go on call, but I did not have to act on it.

I left at 4:00 PM, the usual departure time for the lucky individual who is on call, and stopped by the store to pick up sandwiches for dinner, as well as some milk, fruit, a pint of ice cream, and some SoBe diet beverages that were on sale. I got home and let the dogs out to do their business, checked the mail, fed and watered the dogs and then set up my PC. All I had to do was wait for our handover.

My colleague/TL called for the handover and told me that nothing needed to be done and he hoped I had a good, quiet evening. I hung up and began to channel surf while I waited for my wife to get home from her job. While i was surfing, my mobile rang, but it was my wife, not a customer. She and I chatted for a while and she told me she would be home around 6:30 PM. I nibbled on chips ("crisps" for the British readers of my blog) when the phone rang again. This time it was our help desk calling. They informed me that an exchange server that is heavily used during business hours was not processing mail, even though it was pingable and successfully completed a tracert. The customers listed in the ticket (the ones who decided to call in) did not answer their phones when I called, so I decided to bite the bullet and call the server support team and make the ticket a high priority. It was a "deal with it now or deal with it later" issue and dealing with it in the early evening is better than dealing with it at 2:00 AM.

I called our off shored support in Asia who quickly looked at the issue. The sad thing is that they did the exact same troubleshooting as the help desk did...nothing more. They then called me to tell me that they could not get in touch with the L3 support in the US. Actually that is what he meant. What actually came out of his mouth was much different and after spending a few minutes clarifying, I called the on call myself.

The on call contacted me within 15 minutes (per agreement) but told me that he would need to contact someone else since he was not able to handle the issue for a couple of good reason. I told him okay, and that this was a high priority case. He informed me that he understood and roughly 2 hours later, I was contacted again by the tech and his manager to inform me that the proper person was working on the case. By 10:15 PM, the issue was resolved, but it was too late to contact the customer so I just updated the ticket, cc'd a few people on an e-mail, and went to bed. My night was quiet after that. I even managed to watch a little WEC (World Extreme Cagefighting), an MMA league, before I went to bed. While I only saw a few fights...the ones I saw were very good.

I got up to a wonderful light show in the heavens as a storm just east of us kicked in. Little Man did not want to walk in it, but I made him and he eventually did his business. Since my wife was not up yet, I was able to move about and get most of what I wanted to do done before I left. I did however, forget to put the garbage and recycle bins where they could be easily picked up. Most likely the guys on the truck will still pick them up, but I do not want to tempt fate. We have been pretty good about keeping up with that in the past and we even have engaged the crew in conversation a couple of times, although they were not overly responsive. I guess polite people do not talk to them much.

I got to work EARLY...yes!

"Wait a minute, El Gee...you told us you are hardly ever late. Why brag that you were early?"

Well, the new job does not require me to be at work at 7:00, but my TL/colleague told me it works better if we can be there by that time or shortly after. Monday I was here at 7:10 AM, yesterday, 7:05 AM, and today...6:53 AM. Not bad for me, considering I have not changed my wake up time to accommodate getting to work 30 minutes earlier. I still get up at 5 AM no matter when I have to be at work ;) .