digsite

Well, here I am at work with two days off behind me and two days off ahead of me. I really hope things stay as slow as they’ve been over the last 2 hours. We have one major failure which, big surprise!, the boss just asked my coworker to fix it using the exact same method I told him.

Let’s see, if failing_server + all_new_hardware + five_days_problem = still_failing_server then failing_server = bad_filesystem = rebuild server from scratch

simple as that.

I’m so glad he’s the one dealing with it. I prefer not to have much to do today. I’m trying real hard to make this feel like just another day off and that I really had 5 days off straight. I already went to Einstein Bagle and to Starbucks to get my breakfast. They’re right next to eachother in this same complex.

I work in what used to be IBM’s headquarters and manufacturing plant in the 70’s. This place is huge! and they used to occupy every last square foot of it. Today they only have a small office and the rest is owned by someone else and leased to a couple dozen companies including mine and the post office. You know, the same post office where anthrax spores were found after an employee was diagnosed with pulonary anthrax. This all happened after 9/11. I’m also right across the street from the American Media building where the first anthrax fatality worked and where a second employee tested positive for exposure to anthrax.

Yeah, I feel safe.

I’ve often wondered if terrorists would ever want to target my company specifically because at one time we were the largest web hosting company in the world. Probably not so much anymore, tho. We’re that company that never advertizes, who does webhosting for a couple dozen other companies who you think might do their own if you judged by their advertizing but is really just us doing it for all of them. LOL! Because if you want to do webhosting, why hire 3 dozen people and develop a platform and reinvent the wheel when you can just commision us to do it for you, eh?

right.

But we’re not supposed to talk about it so I’m not really talking about it.

Before this job, I worked for EDS. Another company who never advertised (except for that cool cat herding commercial) and they did jobs for other people and you just never got to hear their name mentioned. EDWho? It was a royal pain to explain who they were and what they did. Same problem now. And people over the age of 40, which covers most of our relatives, always forget what you said and ask again next time they see you.

We were the magicians behind the scenes, the gnome who turns the fridge light on and off. I like being that invisible player so much that my cubicle is waaay in the back and my monitors so high that nobody can tell if I’m back here or not when they pass by my isle. In fact, I think we’re all like that in my department. We lock ourselves in an area where only our passes can open the door and we keep the lights off. Well now we have to keep the lights dimmed (fire hazzard or something) And we call this room the dungeon. How nice. We talk about the dungeon like everyone should know. And they do.

At the coffee machine and customer service or tech support person passes by me. “oh, you work in the dungeon right? please don’t break any servers today. I’d like a quiet day” Ahem, and why in the hell do they assume we break machines? Do they think we like to work? When you have about 800 servers (nobody really knows what the count is anymore) across 20 datacenters in 12 countries, things are bound to break. Get used to it. They should be thanking us for our magic work, the rabbits we pull out of our asses, and all the problems we fix that they don’t even know about. On those days you thought it was slow? Yah, I bet you we were scurrying around like bunnies in heat… in the dungeon, in the dark.

Anyways, I’ve got 5 hours left in my day. Time to explore how many other ways I can slack off before my time is up.