Waste of money and time...

NotStyro

Shared on Wed, 12/12/2007 - 16:18
I took the gamble and screwed the pooch big-time...

I took time off work on last Fri & Sat to celebrate my birthday peacefully & without work complications. Two days, 10 hour shifts, 20 hours. Ta-da. I even took the time off knowing that I was on-call for my group, figuring that I might get called once or twice for probably a max of four hours of OT. At much less than $100 I could live with giving that up for a peaceful birthday.

So yesterday I'm playing some TF2 on a great server with a great bunch of people, contemplating when to leave to watch a movie, and I get the call. Trouble at a remote site, nothing is working, server down & client systems have issues. OK, sounds like the server crashed. I can easily fix that in a couple hours.

Twelve hours (12!!) later the problem is finally solved and the site is working normally. Twelve hours that could have been OT. Arrrggh!!!

I tell ya, it does nobody any good to pull the problem description out of your ass and slap the mess up on the incident queue. Utter fiction, then it was like pulling teeth from several people, all of whom use English as a second language, just to extract some glimmer of truth. Combine that info with what little was observable on the server & clients and with the involvement of three off-duty team members you come to the conclusion six hours later that the problem belongs to another team.

Naturally, that team doesn't have a on-call person. Have the service desk (dispatches high-priority incidents) call the dept manager. An hour later..."I left a message on his cell phone"...idiots & fools. I wind up having to call the other dept manager just to learn I could have called either of the two people in that dept that could have helped. Just don't put that in writing, ok?...right. Time to write a letter to an executive director.

Wake up one staffer who says is going to look at it. One hour later get a call from the other who says the same thing (?!). Another hour later the last one calls back to ask for specifics about the problem and, btw, what site is it? WTF?!!!! It is ~3am and you idiots are jerking my junk around (and not in a good way)?!

Yeah, so about four hours of back and forth calls and analysis later the problem gets solved. What can really floor you is that the problem had been brewing for the past 48 hours and the other dept staffer had worked on the remote site server earlier in the day. He just decided it wasn't serious enough to fix at that time!

I tells ya, it was good thing we had a class on the laws & rules regarding violence in the workplace.

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