This site has moved to robert.williamsonline.us.
I think God is smiting me.
Two weeks ago, I was carrying the support pager during the days on the weekend (8am-8pm Saturday, 8am - midnight Sunday). Normally you might expect 4 or 5 calls each day. That Sunday, I got 15. I spent the whole day doing support.
This weekend, I had the night shift. Midnight Friday/Sat - 8am Saturday, then 8pm Saturday - 8am Sunday.
I thought surely the law of averages would work out and I wouldn't get very many calls, since the last time I had support I got a lot.
Ha!
I got a page Saturday just before midnight. I tried to boot up my computer and dial in to find out what was going on. Oops, my computer won't start. Just blankly stares at me. I had to unplug it to turn it off. I mindlessly tried rebooting it like that about 5 times. Then I decided maybe it was the memory. So I yanked out one stick, reseated the other, and rebooted. No luck. I performed all possible permutations of memory sticks with no luck at all. I suspect the motherboard is going bad. But I could only do limited troubleshooting because my wife (who is 7 months pregnant and suffering from a head cold right now) was trying to sleep and I was disturbing her.
So about 12:30 am I hop in my car to drive to work. Got here about 1:00 am. Talked to the woman on the phone and remotely watched the computer screen. Discovered the barcode scanner was not plugged in well.
I hopped back in my car and headed home. It was right at 1:45 am. I was about 10 minutes from the plant when I got 2 pages simultaneously. A third one followed a couple of minutes later.
There was some sort of power surge that knocked out power for a few seconds. It took down roughly 2/3rds of our manufacturing system. And I am the fortunate guy who gets to restart it.
Unfortunately, our monitoring tools didn't work correctly so I had to check each client individually. It was a slow process. And restarting a client takes a while and ties up the server. It took about an hour and a half to get it all straightened out. Now it's 4:00 am.
Yuck.
Posted by Robert at May 05, 2002 03:00 AM