Time Travelling Telephony

MeesterTurner

Had a problem with our phone at home last night, so I went on Virgin's status page to if anything was up in our general area.

Now that's service - Fixed before it was reported!!! Unfortunately, the time I checked that page was after it was reported, but wasn't actually working yet :-/

derula

@MeesterTurner said:

Fixed before it was reported!!!

This can be achieved without time travel. The numbers might even be correct, and it just took a while before it worked again after it had been fixed.

Without knowing the circumstances, this might not be a WTF! But yeah, it seems likely to be one.

PJH

@derula said:

Without knowing the circumstances,

This is Virgin Media. That's all you need to know.

@derula said:

this might not be a WTF!

Highly unlikely. It'd more likely that the Gregorian Calendar had rolled round much like the Mayan one will next year, and it's 2011 again - having taken Virgin just under one complete Age to fix something.

RTapeLoadingError

I think it's a scam to meet their SLAs. E.g.

Problem gets noticed at 14:27 (SLA is 2 hours to fix)
Problem gets repaired at 17:39
Problem gets raised in the call logging system at 18:52

Time to fix is -1:13 which is great for the metrics

esoterik

@derula said:

@MeesterTurner said:
Fixed before it was reported!!!

This can be achieved without time travel. The numbers might even be correct, and it just took a while before it worked again after it had been fixed.

Without knowing the circumstances, this might not be a WTF! But yeah, it seems likely to be one.

This could be a time zone issue, i.e. the issue gets reported at and timestamped with the servers local time and the person who is assigned to fix it lives a couple of timezones over, and they estimate when they will be finished in their local time resulting in a an apparent WTF.

A friend of mine was doing some contract work for some game studio in england, and they initally had problems integrating his changes since the IDE would fail to recompile since his changes appeared to be several hours in the future, and that files .obj wasn't yet out of date. Only after a while of his fixes suddenly and mysteriously starting to take effect, 7 hours after they were made, did someone realize the answer. Adding a touch command to the change submission procedure solved the issue. Though i guess TRWTF is that the file timestamps were saved in local time and not an absolute time. (i don't recall when and if windows changed this behavior, edit actually this could be a filesystem thing, i.e. fat32 does local time, NTFS does UTC?).

Scarlet_Manuka

@esoterik said:

actually this could be a filesystem thing, i.e. fat32 does local time, NTFS does UTC?

[url=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724290(v=vs.85).aspx]According to Microsoft[/url], you are correct.

The NTFS file system stores time values in UTC format, so they are not affected by changes in time zone or daylight saving time. The FAT file system stores time values based on the local time of the computer.