Work Rants

I have some thoughts on planned downtime. Ultimately it boils down to this: is the planned downtime caused by urgent, impending, and guaranteed doom? If yes, then by all means have the downtime whenever you can. If not, affected as few customers as possible, by the numbers. Planned system downtime should minimize impact to system usage - period. By "System Usage" I mean real customers using the system. I recently had a discussion with the systems group about a necessary outage on a system I support. Something important, but not urgent had the possibility to cause downtime on the system. However, if something went wrong and we had to restart a server, the server might not come up. This was deemed as needing pretty serious attention (which I agreed with). They found a fix and wanted to put it into production, as an emergency, planned downtime. We had a downtime window coming up, but this should probably happen before the window. They suggested an evening. Google Anal...

Two days ago I decided, at the spur of the moment, to take the rest of the week off. Where I work, we get the week between Christmas and New Years off. So taking the rest of the week off gives me a whopping two weeks off in a row! I have not had that kind if time off since I started working in the real world. I am currently in day two of the vacation. How is my week of solitude to rest and recoup going? Not well. Today, an issue came up that normally I would delegate to one of my underlings, but they are all on vacation in other countries. So, I needed to come to the rescue - as is my specialty. My accursed speciality. So, at 8:30 a.m. this morning, the issue comes in and I get to work on it. Except that I cannot, because I locked out my account . Fun. After a shower where I bitched and complained the whole time about having to work on my two weeks off, my account was unlocked and I started up again, more carefully this time. I work the rest of the morning to reinforce my opi...