Monday, December 15, 2008

Another lost weekend


Working in data processing, you occasionally have lost periods of time. Nights, weekends, entire days. This past weekend was one of those. The company I contract at, one of the largest snack food producers in the world, schedule to test their computer systems disaster recovery. Usually, they start those test in November, and on a Tuesday through a Thursday. My job usually starts about 1o to 15 hours into it. Which means I usually pull an all night shift at IBM's disaster recovery site. Thankfully, it isn't too far from where we live. This year, the schedule started at noon on a Friday! And went 56 hours. Let's do the math. Yes, completing at 8 PM Sunday night. I lucked out a bit this year. My supervisor volunteered for the night shift! He reported about 9 PM Friday night. I attempted to relive him at 8 AM Saturday morning. Except he was so far along, he said he'd stay and together we'd be done by noon. That suited me, as our fourteen year old's birthday party was that afternoon. Since we were done so early, that shortened up my 8 AM to 8 PM shift and eliminated his 8 PM to 8 AM shift. Trouble was, all the other systems were not going to complete until about 5 AM Sunday morning. Translation: Thanks for doing all this, we will start checking it out tomorrow!

There was on NTOA meet Saturday, which I'd bowed out of.
I was asked to play drums for church on Sunday, but had bowed out due to the scheduled work.
That was a good thing, as my cell phone started going off on the way home from 9 AM church. I would work 10 minutes to fix a problem, or an hour. Then go try and do some leaf raking or some other weekend chore. The cell phone would go off again and I'd go back to fixing the next problem. The fun part, was they give us all-powerfull logon ID's. So we can do most anything we want. IBM also allows us to remotely connect. At least we didn't have to go back in. The bad part of that, is that while you are connected to IBM, you can't be connected to much of anything else. I'd get a call, they tell me they were sending an email or IM. You had to be "on work" connection. Then, disconnect, reconnect to IBM. Evaluate and solve the problem. Log back off, back on, call back, email back. ETC.


On TOP of all that, due to that I also support the payroll system, I had to work on an emergency-for-year-end-or-2007-taxes-are-toast project!


Short story, about 20 hours work over the Saturday and Sunday.
My cell phone, had a fully charged battery on Sunday morning. By 7 PM, it was flashing "low batt" at me.


But I still managed to be at daughters birthday and also rake up 11 bags of leaves.

No comments: