So I had to work late last night. We were upgrading a customer in Omaha, and we had to start the procedure at 11:00 pm to minimize the impact to their paying customers. So, picture this: I'm sitting at home alone in the dark, dialed into a conference bridge, logged into the remote system. We've got two or three guys from my company on the bridge, plus a couple folks from the customer site.
Things went well for the first couple of hours. I find it helps to pretend that you're working in NASA's mission control. Like if you say things like "Moving on to procedure 3.12, step 6 'stopping replication on the RTX' ... please standby," though I drew the line at saying "Roger" in response to each statement.
Anyway ... things went well, that is, until we hit a snag (go figure!). We couldn't copy the data from the old database into the new database. Things pretty much came to a standstill while we got some designers from India to log into the system and start mucking around in the database. In my defense, let me just say that this took a long, long time.
I'm not entirely sure what time I fell asleep, but I was awakened by my cell phone at 4:30 am. Well, "awakened" is probably being optimistic. I don't remember exactly what he said - something about the database being ready, and had I finished step something or other. But I got the general sense that we were finished. At least, I hope so, 'cause I went to bed after I hung up. So, I probably didn't earn a merit badge in dependability last night, but everything turned out just fine.
At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment