I came into work at 4 am because something called a “Queue Manager” decided that it didn’t like its new home in the new computer center.
This problem generated a conference call. After assuring everyone that I had no idea what to do, they all breathed at me uncomfortably until assured them that I was on my way out the door on my way into work at 3:30 am. Yay.
Upon arriving, the “Queue Manager” tells me that it’s mad and therefore MQRCCF_COMMAND_FAILED which the include file tells me is equal to FUCK_YOU. Thanks IBM.
Anyway…does anybody else have a job where “fault tolerance” means that faults are treated as a valid lifestyle choice for expensive servers?
Oh lordy, someone has been playing with MQ Series. Very nice tool, but there are a billion settings, any one of which can cause the standard “Comminucations failed…bet you can’t guess where!” error.
I too was called in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. Some moron decided to schedule a server reboot at 2:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. So here we are with a server that’s trying to start up a listener on the mainframe, but the listener already exists. Wheee. After 45 minutes saying the same thing over and over, I finally got annoyed, told them to restart the listeners on the mainframe and STFU.
6:00 a.m. I get another call essentially saying “There is a prio 1 IR sitting out here saying that the server can’t talk to the mainframe. However, communications look to be working fine now. Can we close this IR?” Grrr, I didn’t open the IR, I didn’t work the IR, I shouldn’t be getting called at 6:00 in the morning to be asked questions about it.
But my wife was happy about it. She was so frig’n excited about Christmas this year that I never got to get back to sleep after the 6:00 phone call… sigh. I usually have a rule that gifts can not be opened before dawn, but that’s not something you can tell my wife.
Fun, fun, fun. I got my call on the 24th thankfully. Still enough to have me saying four letter words until about 4PM that day. It also forced me to VPN in on the 25th so I could fuck around on the server for fifteen minutes. Hooray for IT!
“Now, let us demonstrate as all your processing power, bandwidth and technology reverts to 1988 levels by trying to rename this folder on the remote server.”
crowd oohs and ahhs in amazement, applause is rampant
“Hear hear! If only we at Microsoft can make sure everyone has to do everything through VPN, we’ll make a killing off Intel, AMD and telecom shares again!”
We’ve got Cisco VPN. It’s almost as good as being at work over the cable connection. Until I got cable, it’d be a bear to dial in. Now, I can do what I need to do in seconds. Thankfully, pcAnywhere is on just about every server too. Easy in and out.
Aat least you assholes have jobs and are needed. Shut up and do your fucking jobs, and don’t come back until you’ve thanked god for the lifestyle that we Americans currently enjoy, at the expense of the soldiers overseas who had to sit in bunkers on Christmas, watching sand fleas copulate on the barrels of their assault rifles.
Incidentally, I got to leave at 11:30am, but then Cathcart got called in to troubleshoot some other stupid problem later that afternoon.
I think the whole complaining issue is a grass is always greener conundrum. When you have a job, you wish you didn’t have to work, and when you don’t have a job, you wish you had a job.
The best part of this story is that I should have gone in, being on-call, but I slept through the beeper alarm and by the time I called in he was already there. Thanks, Spoof, I’ll consider it a Christmas present!
Of course, I did have to drive in the next day, in the middle of my vacation, so I guess it evens out. This job sucks.
