Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
AIIIIEEE!
I was woken up at 1 A.M. last night to "check on computers"
it sucks being on call!
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At a former employer, I had just sat down to dinnaer at around 8pm when the phone rang. It was a niught supervisor complaining they couldn't log in to the Unix server. I could get in fine from home over ssh, so I figured I had better go see what was up. (I lived about 10 minutes walk from the facility.)
I arrived to find everyone sitting on their hands. The Unix server was down and powered off. So was the Novell server. One or the other I could understand, but
both? So I powered them back on, and my irony meter pegged off scale as the gig mutha UPS they were plugged into glitched and put both down again.
I disconnected them, took the UPS out of service, found other places to plug them in, brought them back up, did the needed cleanup, and got people up and working again. I got home, popped dinner into the microwave, ate around 10pm, and went to bed around midnight.
At 2am my phone rang. It was the night lead supervisor. She was having problems accessing the NT server where the templates for the nightly reports lived. I blinked sleep out of my eyes, suggested a couple of things she could try, said "If they don't work, leave a note on my desk. I'll send your reports for you in the morning." and went back to sleep.
At 2:30am the phone rang and woke me again. It was the might supervisor. She just wanted to tell me she was able to get to the files and I didn't have to worry about it...
Me employer was in the process of being acquired, and I was at an integration meeting the next day to discuss how we would merge the systems. The SVP of Operations who hired me originally was present. He asked how I was, and I said "Tired" and explained why. When I got the the phone calls at 2 and 2:30, his eyes got big and he said "Why is she calling you at that time on the morning over something so
trivial?" "Larry, it's because she doesn't
know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job, and dot all the Is and cross all the Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still
alive now..." (I already had a conversation with her direct boss about making sure she understood the sky would not fall and the world would not end if the nightly reports didn't get sent because of a technical glitch, and I could deal with it in the morning.)
She was let go somewhat later, and I suspect the underlying reason was "Too stupid to do the job."
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Dennis