A pub denied: One man's tale of festive frolics postponed by the curse of the On Call phone On the first day of Christmas, the bork gods sent to me: a server they said had ceased to be. Welcome to the Twelve Borks of Christmas (12BoC): a collection of Register reader stories of amusing and frustrating tech sightings over the festive period. Today's is a seasonally appropriate tale courtesy of a reader Regomised as " …
Punch at parties? How quaint.
It's a habit we picked up from the Brits back in the late 1600s, but as far as I know, with the exception of kid's parties, that custom went away with the repeal of prohibition. No need to disguise booze anymore.
Note for the prudes in the audience: The kiddie version usually contains no booze.
There are 16 total posts (17 now) that mention both me and IR35. Of those, half of them are our confused AC (and at least one that seems to have been removed), the other half are people, self included, wondering what he's rabbiting on about.
Methinks his butter's done slipped off his biscuit. Ignore him.
Excuse me? Eggnog is most definitely a booze-drink in the US, and apple juice is fermented for preservation here just as it is in every other civilized country where apples grow.
Yes, alcohol free co-called "eggnog" exists here, as does plain old apple juice. But then both exist pretty much everywhere ... not everyone likes alcohol.
Make mine applejack/calvados ... and the dryer the better.
Their own pages:
"Our core audience is in America, Asia-Pacific, and the UK..."
"We have journalists in America, Australia, and Britain..."
Situation publishing put their US address, but their UK phone number, first...
It's an international publication, and whether you get a US or UK based article will depend on the journalist (though I suspect editorial standards will also play a significant role).
Either you or they are meant to say "for that was not his name" in these cases.
On one project that the Fates may have disliked from the start, I had a need to substitute human names with different human names, consistently. So I made a lookup table, and I made it (1) preservative of binary gender, (2) limited to common names, and (3) changing any name in the first half of the alphabet to the second half, and vice versa. So no one got their own name back.
The Fates, or management, objected that my system could give people with different original names, the same new name. At least I think that's what they didn't like... I don't remember if I tried to argue that some people have the same names anyway, or that confusing the data was the actual point of my activity. At length, the project quietly died; I was doing other things anyway.
When you can get it. I remember a few 16 hour days, when our vendor at time couldn't figure out our networking issue, and sent a team to investigate\correct the issue, as their remote support was drawing blanks. I followed their guys around and opened switch cabinets for double time pay...
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I followed their guys around and opened switch cabinets for double time pay...
A little more work was involved when a client I was assigned to as a contractor had its exchange server get its knickers sufficiently twisted that there was severe pinching of the server's private parts, requiring a full reinstall. With the old server still hobbling along during office hours, when it was most needed, the decision was made to cut over to the freshly installed one, still utterly devoid of accounts and data, during the night, restoring an export of the exchange database.
The next morning it was revealed that this first attempt had just transferred the knickertwisting to the new server. Some frantic support calls were made, and a untwisting tool was provided. Which, it was suggested by MS support, should be run on the original server, as it would provide both an unblemished export as well as logging on the extent of the twisting and pinching. Afterwards the export would have to be loaded on the new server. Both steps would take 6 or 7 hours, going by the previous attempt, and as the Windows/Exchange admin was still knackered from the night before I offered to monitor it (the buttons to click were clearly shown in the instructions, so that part was easy). So a full night, easily.
Another time something had gone wrong with a software upgrade on the VMS cluster, and two of us had been busy from four in the afternoon until around three in the morning to untangle the mess, after which the end--of-day job and the nightly backup still had to be run; I left at six in the morning.
Both times the penpushers at the contracting co[0] refused to accept my overtime claim even though they had been signed off by the head of IT at the client; I had to have left at the end of the workday. Which is not how I'd act in such a case whether or not that's okayed by some gormless office twonk, and I had to threaten them with Extreme LARTing if my next payslip didn't show those hours.
[0] yes, the ones I ranted about not a week ago.
In a previous life, I got a page from the fellow who ran the nightly back office batch processing for a bank's treasury group... about two hours into drinking with an old friend on a Friday night at a raucous bar with live Dixieland jazz blaring in the background. I found the payphone in the back of the bar, called him back, and found that he'd run a job out of order. The fix to the problem wasn't complex... but having been drinking for a couple of hours didn't help. Somehow we were able to discuss what needed to be done over the phone despite the alcohol and bar room noise and got the batch jobs sorted out and the rest of the nightly jobs on their way.
I managed the opposite. I accidentally jiggled the power cable going into one of the PSUs in an HP blade enclosure, only to have all the PSUs trip, taking down every blade.
It turned out that one of the other 'redundant' power supplies was kaput, and failed when it experienced more load.
I had my first Christmas dinner in 15 years thanks to the lockdown. It was also the first Christmas in my lifetime that my dad never got his tinsel on the ceiling, cards on the wall and Christmas tree in the corner. I always volunteered to be on call on Christmas as there was next to no users and no support so basically 'turn it off and on again'.
Lockdown Hogmanay will be harder as it was always the bigger celebration. Christmas Day only became a public holiday here in 1958, Boxing Day in 1974. Christmas in Scotland
One point of interest to the typographically minded here is the defunct letter Ȝ Yogh. It's replacement by a Z due to early print sets explains why so many Scottish place names are pronounced differently from how they are spelled. Indeed that goes for peoples names too. John Menzies - John Minghess! Never trust a zed in Scotland, or an MH or BH combination.
Oh, I just remembered Christmas 1994 at Sky TV, but that was a pre-planned job, swapping out mirrored drives in a server. Backup, replace, restore. Easy, right? And it was really easy, just made extra scary.
It wasn't our server, we were sub-contractors or Sky were our clients, whatever. None of the Sky techs would touch it because it was 'mission critical'. None of our staff were 'on call' to offer me support because whoever screwed it up would be sack~rificed. We'd have lost our biggest contract, jobs would have been lost, but I had the jingle balls to pull it off. I'm an old cowhand!
Yippee ki yay!
I was on call one Christmas, pretty much guaranteed good money for zero work. Except... pager went off, and I had to sober up (a bit) and make the call to the customer - probably an urgent, system down issue. But no, a question on SQL syntax use - really? They hadn't called in the last 10 months they had the support contract with us but now, on the birthday of the Baby Jesus, they had an obscure problem with SQL syntax? I guess it was a test. I wonder if the person making the call got the same kind of out of hours fee as I did.
who was known for being unable to change the line printer paper and would call for 'service'.
After a multi-call weekend, I froze the customer-supplied Motorola pager into a large-ish block of ice and sent it back to the manager along with an accounting of the out-of-scope service calls and what it cost them to have me change their printer paper for them.
The pager, once unfrozen, worked fine and I was never again called for paper loading work.
If your system is (a) written in Java and (b) running under any sort of framework or in a container, then explain to the person calling you that for you to get the proper “context” (a great word that literally has no meaning at all) they must recite to you the entire Java stack trace so you can, as the specialist, determine the best course of action for someone else to take.
Given modern cadences and even allowing for a clear line, a Java exception stack trace that has needed to pass through the entire set of proxies, shims, annotations, custom classes woven in “because”, the container and the container’s container will take around 9 days and 16 hours to receipt - and that includes pro-tricks like saying “dot” instead of “period”. Treble that time if you are using Teams.
Leave the phone somewhere with the call running and just get on with your life. By the time the poor support person has finished the exception - which is always, without fail, a Null Pointer Error - your agile team will have released at least six total refactors which makes the entire stack trace invalid anyway.
Everyone wins!
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