Tuesday, July 05, 2005

And The Moon Is The Only Light We'll See

I've got my work team's 24/7 support cell phone for this week. Which means, if one of the scheduled jobs that support our business area fail, I get the call. 9 times out of 10 there's nothing I can do about it (it's like waking me to tell me that it's raining outside -- that's nice; not much I can do about it, but thanks for letting me know) but I guess someone somewhere feels good that I get woken from a comfortable deep slumber to be told that a job failed only to give one of two answers:

1) Okay, re-run the job
2) Okay, that's fine, leave it - we'll look at it in the morning

Answers, which are typically already written into the "runbooks" for the jobs already. But again, despite the fact that the instructions on what to do when most types of errors occur are laid out in writing, we must ensure that we wake someone up and get a verbal confirmation. I blame our anal auditors for that policy.

I knew it wasn't going to be a good night when I received 3 calls before dinner yesterday. I should have known I'd get a call in the middle of the night. But I'm still ticked that the 2:30 AM call woke me from a deep, restful sleep and that after logging in and looking into the issue, it took me more than an hour to get back to sleep, completely messing up my plans of getting up at 4:45 for a quick morning job. Maybe I should have just gone jogging when I couldn't get back to sleep -- it was, after all, close enough to the time I was planning on getting up when I actually finally fell asleep.

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