I swapped on-call weekends with my boss so I can go to an up coming convention. It all seemed like a great idea at the time.

Until yesterday…

I was planning to go to a suprise party for some friends of ours. It was to celebrate their 25th anniversary. They are awesome together and I really wanted to show my love and support for them.

About an hour before party my BlackBerry plays me the ‘Someone wants something right NOW’ song. I had the laptop sitting beside my chair so I logged on.

The ticket contained over 100 names of people who were lucky enough to be coming back to work. Each one would be needing access to a myriad of applications, databases, etc… The list contained their first and last names, but ZERO user ids.

I spent over 3 hours looking up each user and collecting their ids. Some of them had as many as three ids to enable.

I formulated my list and processed with some JCL and Natural code to get a spreadsheet of what all each user was to have access to.

Then user by user I processed their email accounts. Gave them back their VPN. Turned on their Mainframe accounts… etc

By now I am 6 hours into this ticket and pretty frustrated.

Getting ready to process the final step, I get a message from the Mainframe stating that it will be in outage for 2 hours starting NOW.

WTF???

So I go to Facebook and put up a status about how/why I am angry and a co-worker calls me ‘Weak’… what ??? I am weak for being pissed cause some people were too lazy to submit this list sooner? I am week because the list should have contained user id’s so I could do my job quickly and not spend an entire Saturday afternoon – Midnight giving these lucky people back what they need to work?

Please, you cannot tell me that no-one knew that these folks were coming back to work on Sunday before Saturday afternoon… BULLSH!T !!!

I finished the process when the Mainframe came back online.

What will today hold?

We shall see, but I am still pretty pissed…

Joby