Today was pretty hectic. I arrived at work at 7:00 am (actually later than normal).

We went to the training room to get ready for a fun filled day of listening to Mainframe admins, *Nix admins, and Windows admins banter back and forth while trying to recover our entire system in 40 hours.

Just to ease your minds, this was a planned disaster. We test ourselves 2 times a year. This was however my first time seeing it in action. I came on at the tail end of the last test; just in time to see all the finger pointing and yelling about who was at fault for what system not getting back online in the alloted time…

Anyway I digress…

The day was actually pretty interesting.

We got off to a rocky start with our highspeed line not syncing properly, finding out there was a new way to ‘dial-up’ to the test facility, and finding that 4 of our phone jacks were not set up on long distance lines…

These items smoothed themselves out in a decent amount of time and we moved forward.

For the better part of the day we simply waited for the Mainframe people to ask us to call the test facility, or we called the server team for updates. Y’know, nothing to elaborate.

It was not until I was ending my 12 hour shift that the perverbial sh!t hit the fan.

It seems our friendly contact at the test facility had gone home for the day only to be replaced with a combinatino of Cleetus T Judd and Atilla the Hun!

I left, drove the 45 miles home, IM’d my replacement and at the time of this posting (2 + hours later) the issue we started to resolve when I left is still unresolved…

I hope things are better in the morning…

Wish us luck…

- Joby