Overload

I have a saying that I have used for years: "Sometimes I get my money's worth out of the company and sometimes the company gets their money's worth out of me". Yesterday (and quite possibly all this week) the latter is true.

My TL/colleague is on vacation. I cover the day and I am on call at night. Yesterday was busy. The world of IT as I knew it was crumbling and I was one of many responsible for tracking it. Luckily for me I am only responsible for regional things...but there were enough things in our region to keep us busy.

The first was the contractor time tracking tool. It is an overly complex system (Windows and Unix, FTP, firewalled and DMZ) that allows any contractor anywhere in the world to enter their time and have it get tracked. We learned that the data had not been updating for a week and no one noticed. Couple that with the fact that the product is supported partially by us and partially from another provider and the support is in three different countries (US, Malaysia, and India) and you have a mess. It is far too complex to go into here...let me just say that I was ready to pull out my hair.

While that little gem was taking shape, we received notice that a server that was patched by our off shored L2 group died and NO ONE BOTHERED TO WORK ON IT all weekend long. I come in Monday to find the machine down, 4 partitions lost, and no one working on it. Again, this issue is still being worked on as a full recovery of the data is being preformed from backup.

We had several "unofficial" priority cases as well. people with lost data (that they deleted) who wanted it restored now (can't let that photo of grandma disappear) and the SAP module used for time tracking (not related to the contractor issue) was hosed. Luckily the restores were taken care of with a phone call and the SAP issue was global, not local so I was off the hook. Not that it mattered...the first two issues kept me hopping all day long.

Since work was in total chaos, what better way to add to it than a call from my wife telling me her laptop is giving her an odd error. What the beast was doing was blue screening on her. When I got home and had a moment to look at it, I found two major issues. The first one was a bad DIMM. While I had spares, they were the wrong kind for her laptop, so I had to take out the bad DIMM and let her go with just half the normal memory. Once that was done, I installed a HDD monitor and almost immediately it warned me her drive is failing. Joy. I really cannot complain though. The laptop was free and we only put about $30 or so into it, plus a lot of time. If I want to buy a hdd and some RAM, it will cost me ($100 or so) and I am not sure it is worth doing for a 6 year old laptop. I guess I will see.

The night was quiet (only because the teams working on the issues failed to contact me with updates) so I was able to watch a little TV (IFL Battleground and The 4400) before I went to bed with a headache...one I still have this morning.

I wonder what the rest of the week will bring?