So Close



  • It was almost quitting time. A long, boring, do-nothing day consigned to the past. My coat was on, my bag was over my shoulder. All that remained was to put the laptop to sleep. I closed the lid.

    Then a coworker scurries over: Don't Leave: something's wrong!

    What happened?

    I don't know.

    What is throwing alarms?

    The xxx application is throwing exceptions at the rate of about 100/second (very bad thing).

    Which machine?

    All of them!

    How can all those production servers, with auto-switchover-hot-standby's suddenly go south at the same time? Did the DB die? No. Did the network die? No. Did a network disk crash? Are we out of log space? How did all the monitoring software miss *whatever*? WTF?!

    Since my machine was already down-for-the-night, I walked over to Mr. Calamity's desk and saw all the emails - from the DEVELOPMENT box. Apparently, someone had rebooted it, and Mr Calamity didn't bother to read the email warning about it. When connectivity was lost, the application goes into an infinite loop retrying whatever-operation-failed - without a volume-slowdown - and bombs you with bad-thing emails. Changing it to throttle the messages is a very low priority and they won't let me do it.

    I laughed, told him to recall all the oh-shit emails he had just sent to senior management, and left.

    As I'm half way to the bus, my phone rings (my boss); What did Mr. Calamity do now? I describe the "problem". I take it he didn't try to recall his alarm emails? We laugh.

    Sigh.

     



  • Sounds fishy. If Mr Calamity had run around rebooting production servers to "fix things", that would be more plausible!

    OTOH: You missed an opportunity. Should have emailed all the same people he did with a BOFHesque explanation of how you saved the day. Could have been worth the time to reboot the laptop and miss your bus.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @snoofle said:

    It was almost quitting time.

    {perk} Oh? Finally?

    @snoofle said:

    A long, boring, do-nothing day
     

    Oh. For the day.

    So close.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @snoofle said:

    It was almost quitting time.

    {perk} Oh? Finally?

    @snoofle said:

    A long, boring, do-nothing day
     

    Oh. For the day.

    So close.

     

    Fess up. You're a humorist, aren't you?

     

    We don't like those around here.

     



  • I'd say it is more an outcry for the hurting to stop. All these anecdotes of Snoofles are making me hemorrhage.



  • I have to agree with RichP, you should have milked this for all its worth, and make it appear that you just saved the company from total failure (and magically did it in such a way to result in having no down time in the production environment too).



  • @Anketam said:

    I have to agree with RichP, you should have milked this for all its worth, and make it appear that you just saved the company from total failure (and magically did it in such a way to result in having no down time in the production environment too).

     

     

    That just means they'll add it to his regular duties.  But then they probably already have.

     

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @dhromed said:

    Fess up. You're a humorist, aren't you?
     

    I've been known to dabble...

     @dhromed said:

    We don't like those around here.

    ... in crack and otter-erotic masturbation. But not humor. No sir. Not me. Backing away.

     @dhromed said:

    Yes I do

    I'm getting mixed messages here. :|



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    ... otter-erotic masturbation.

     

    My imagination is failing me. How does that work?

     



  • At least Mr. Calamity was paying attention.

    We have a similar service that spams non-critical error notification that I too am not allowed to fix due to it being low priority.  Last month, we rolled out an update to this service and somehow the notification destination got screwed up.  The primary person responsible for getting the notifications (who is the person who deployed the update) suddenly stopped getting all notifications from this service.  He didn't notice for a month until there was an actual problem.  The rest of us found out during the "why didn't we respond to this in a timely manner" meeting. The icing on the cake was that one of the other recipients of the error notifications had opened a help desk case stating that he wasn't getting them and our resident genius had been sitting on that case for two weeks.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @erikal said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    ... otter-erotic masturbation.

     

    My imagination is failing me. How does that work?

     

     

    Just barely, and with plenty of fish.

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    Just barely, and with plenty of fish.

     

    Sick!

     



  • @erikal said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    Just barely, and with plenty of fish.

     

    Slick!

     

     

    I FIXED THAT FOR YOU.

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @erikal said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    ... otter-erotic masturbation.

     

    My imagination is failing me. How does that work?

     

     

    Just barely, and with plenty of fish.

     

     

     

     

     So you must be the guy in the joke who, when the car mechanic says "you blew a seal" responds "no, it's just ice cream". 

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @SQLDave said:

    So you must be the guy in the joke who, when the car mechanic says "you blew a seal" responds "no, it's just ice cream". 
     

    No, don't be stupid. I'm lactose intolerant, and my mechanic knows it.

    Besides, I swallow. There's children starving in africa, and you want to waste seal sperm? Shame on you.


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