Friday, August 15, 2008

Rounding The Corner

I am coming up on the end of my work week. I still have three more nights of on call (plus two days) but since I took it "one day at a time", things have moved quickly. As a matter of fact, this week went by quicker than most. Then again, I was busier than normal.

Of course the week can't just end peacefully. It tried to. Today started off with a bang and then died. It was slow all day long until the help desk calls me up (okay actually they IM'ed me) about two issues the customer deemed "critical". The first one was a tool that is considered business critical but it is not down. According to what I have read, it is just running slower than they want it to. I was very hesitant to make this a high priority case until I received some additional info from the manager. I eventually caved, but I think he may be mostly right.

The second case that "demanded" high priority status was not in any way shape or form high severity for Friday evening at 4:30 PM CDT. One person, ONE SOLE PERSON, could not connect to his home drive (Windows) and he wants it raised. He is not even a mid level manager. He then claims that others are having "intermittent" problems. Our server team had the ticket and since they were not overly busy they looked at it and found the server up and responding. It had been up for 27 days.

My guess is that it is a LAN issue. They have a kludged together network bootstrapped to the WAN of the company that bought them (our main customer) and they have had issues from day one...mostly their own. Software that is buggy and does not work well, strange configs that boggle the mind, etc. Needless to say I shot that request down.

I can only hope that the one issue I raised gets resolved quickly. I hate wasting yet another weekend playing "the waiting game" with the third party support this tool has.

I know it sounds wierd, but I am looking forward to Monday...I will finally be off call and on Friday I will be hitting the road, God willing.

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