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azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)

2007.06.28 Not On Fire

12:14

Last night was apparently interesting at work. I departed at 5:15, and therefore missed all the fun, but --

In the words of Homie G. Jr.: "At 5:30pm local MTZ we were forced to evacuate the building as we discovered an issue with the ac units." Homie G. (Sr.) clarifies: "We had to evacuate the building from 5:30pm to 6:30pm due to an ac unit blowing smoke into the building."

This is the second time within the past two years that one of them has done that. I overheard someone (not someone I recognized) talking on the phone about replacing wiring and this being cheaper than the alternative, though I don't know if he meant electrical, network, or something else. He was in company with the Local Fixit Geek, so I'm guessing network, because there's been some network badness also.

The prime factors of the weird number of query results are 17, 41, 337. Still not having a clue about wtf is up, sorry. I will probably have to dive into my SQL and hack at things. Alas. All it's intended to be is a "format the month properly in a way that won't break in a few years" thing, but ... ow?

12:39

Dove into my SQL. Hasn't helped yet. Rather, did help, but same bad results after changing syntax to match the working one exactly. "Bugger" was said.

12:54

Still not working. Copied and pasted SQL from the working one into the non-working one. Changed to fit the names of the things we're talking about. (Yay standardized naming.) Will not slap user in news-comments for making permies and people who think that fandom and LJ should be able to resolve their differences look bad. Will not slap.

1:50

Meeting with Management. Items:

  • That inconsistency that the office noticed; I should try to track it down. (Not my fault, but I am the troubleshooter.)
    • I had a brainstorm that I should check because it sounds too familiar.
    • I should check it on a Monday afternoon after all has been crunched up to the mothership.
  • 3 weeks off come new job training time.
  • Document all my development process, about what I think is an ugly hack and the things I think are golden. Seriously. In English, so other people can understand it. Oh, and rebuild my database the way I want it to be, once it's working.
  • Send Management those nifty spreadsheets I made for Field, because she hadn't heard about them before. (They've been in place for at least a year now, I think.)
  • I make fudge for bake sale.

Meetings with Management are often on that much crack.

2:38

I hate it when I try to say something and someone misinterprets it and goes off for a good length of time based on the misinterpretation. It's at this point that I preface my clarification with "Sorry -- " and proceed to try and figure out where what I said and what they heard diverged from each other.

2:55

Snarky Lady has gotten in on the act about giving JD a hard time about his soda habit. This could be so much worse if we started talking brand names. As it was, I cautioned him against sharing water with skeevy strangers. *smirk*

There is a training class in here today. One of the new ladies has the visual and spoken tags of a middle-aged quasi-broom-closeted pagan with a brain.

3:51

I may have isolated the names of the people who are appearing in one place but not the other. Raaaaaaagh. I beat data to death until it's time to stop or until I find an answer.

5:04

Data not quite dead yet, but I might be. Time to go home. Hope the air conditioner doesn't catch fire. Again.

A day.

May. 21st, 2006 12:51 am
azurelunatic: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover: a prism splitting a beam of light.  (Dark Side of the Moon)
Work tends to leave me feeling exhausted and drained, sometimes, no matter what kind of a day I had.

Today was an eleven hour shift (for me) featuring two dialer crashes, followed up by an invasion of IT guys taking over the network at 6pm. On the other hand, now pretty much everyone in the building knows how to get on the OMG DIALER DOWNTIME contingency screen in our automated timeclock. They have also gotten experience dialing the old-fashioned way: by hand. Get the next record from the queue, turn on your bloody phone, dial, hang up after 4 rings, get a new record, repeat.

To improve morale, I stalked up and down my areas in the Darth Vader mask for a few minutes, causing some of the phone goons to go into near-hyperventilating states of laughter.

Stressy College Chick doesn't think I caused the first crash.

I got to write up the dialer crash e-mails. I also had a chance to work on my Unified Field Spreadsheet, which is going to virtually eliminate the time working up the individual end-of-shift job status forms, because all the information that goes on the status winds up going on what has been dubbed the TPS report. (There was an Office Space-inspired practical joke phase where people kept telling other people that they'd have to start filling out TPS reports/accusing them of not doing theirs and getting scolded for it; this was followed up by a new spreadsheet to fill out. Since it didn't have much of a name, it got dubbed the TPS report.) I think I shall call it the UnF Spreadsheet for spr0t for short. (Pervs. ;)

Vocabulary word of the day (week?) at work: "defiant". Stressy College Chick called Rev. Not-So-Nice Supervisor defiant, then realized that she didn't really have a good grasp on what it meant. So she asked me. I explained. She concluded that yes, he is, and it's a damn cool word to boot!

Today Rev. Not-so-nice super started attempting to track Trendy Chick's cussing. He spaced it after a while, but before he stopped counting, she'd cussed about 19 times, not counting "pissed off" and a few other things.

I shall call the new trainee supervisor who has the same initials as I do "AL", because while those aren't my actual meatspace initials, they're my initials online. Oddly enough, while I respond to my meatspace initials, I don't react the same way to "AL". So, she will be AL for the moment. No, there is no Sam. (...Nor Captain what's-his-face./Nor Frodo. ...though at one point there was thought of calling Homie G Super "Sam" and Cute Short Chick's brother "Frodo", and I made [livejournal.com profile] othercat totally giggle by suggesting supervisor RPS, which was just wrong.)

Tomorrow may be a doughnuts/muffins morning.

I have been cleaning my iTunes and re-finding music that had the files moved without leaving a forwarding address. Much happiness. Lots of my R.E.M. got lost in the shuffle, and I've been slowly but surely re-finding it. These songs are essential to me.

Morning happens soon. I go bed.

Work

Jan. 15th, 2006 04:01 am
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
Monitored today. The shift didn't start until 10:30, which had supervisors there at 9:30. I had gotten spoiled being check-in so much. Now that the not-enough-work side of the hours crunch is hitting, I will be lucky to get 30 hours this week. That's not such a good thing.

It was the end of the logical week, so there were only ten monitor reports for me to do, and four of them were second-time-'round on people. There was a computer error, largely caused by a klutzy whack at a keyboard that left me re-doing a monitor report after the browser backed out of the report that had just been finished and was about to be submitted. And it was one of those tapes where you can't just scrap it, call it Computer Error, and re-tape and re-monitor live. No, the report had to be re-constructed.

I validated after that. To validate, one winds up calling back a certain percentage of the people surveyed on any given survey to make sure that yeah, we did talk with them, and it wasn't just a phone booth or something. (And we've gotten that.)

The day ended early with downtime.

There was an in-depth discussion (as break trailed to a close) about the recent changes we're still undergoing. There are three child companies of the parent company involved in the aggregation of phone centers. One company outsources everything. Two of them insource things and have phone centers. Of those with phone centers, the other company has six and we have just the one. As Comic Pirate Super pointed out, it makes business sense to have the one phone center do the bulk of (okay, all of) the changing.

So our positions are being made to line up with their positions, and so on and so forth. This seems to be leading to net disgruntlement. Some of the changes are indeed more efficient, but some of them seem very arbitrary and unnecessary.
azurelunatic: Cordless phone showing a heart.  (phone)
Othercat: gate is re-broken. Also, dialer crash. Rose from dayshift warned me on my way in. Downtime. Since 8.
azurelunatic: Cordless phone showing a heart.  (phone)
The system went down. Right after I came in, I got
pulled off the phones to monitor; I am Trendy Chick
Supervisor today.

The system went down. I wound up chatting with a nest
full of old hens; some of them got to talking about
Emily, that excellently cool trans woman we had
working here a while ago. I got the opportunity to
give the old hens a bit of a crash course on
transgender ettiquite: namely, that someone
transitioning should be addressed as their target
gender.

Also, the giggles of the supervisor when you tell them
about what you want to do are inversely proportionate
to how good an idea it actually is to do.

Fun/not fun

Aug. 3rd, 2005 03:53 am
azurelunatic: "Where's the goddamn NERF BAT when you *really* need it?" Animated cartoon tech support loses her cool.  (nerf bat)
Things that are fun:
  • Hanging out with [livejournal.com profile] dustraven
  • getting new high-lighters to replace the ones at work that are running low
  • finding shiny multicolored two-tipped metallic markers
  • having a great huge dust storm turning into a rainstorm
  • finding pretty clothes
  • making a sawed-off nerf noodle for work-related purposes

Things that are not fun:

  • Miscalculating schedules and going somewhere after it closed
  • not being able to reach http://mail.yahoo.com
  • having to reboot the computer
  • still being unable to find Naomi's ring

azurelunatic: Cordless phone showing a heart.  (phone)
The system went down at 8:30 this morning and stayed
down for an hour and fifteen minutes. Joy.

The Animation Acolyte was reading the new Potter book
in the downtime. I grinningly didn't spoil it. She had
some hopes for a favorite character of hers; Not actually a spoiler. )

Mornings are not my best time, except when they are. I
woke up for an hour in the middle of the night and had
difficulty getting back to sleep. That's always
dreadful.

I managed to get booths in half the room cleaned up
during the downtime. Downtime is often a bore for
monitors unless we have friends in on the phone who we
can chill and BS with.

Right now one of the other monitors and I seem to be
doing a 3 stooges routine with the monitoring system.
Only one person can monitor someone at once on the
telnet system, but when someone else tries to go in,
it knocks the person who was there off. This can be
bad when I'm IN THE MIDDLE OF MONITORING SOMEONE. ...
Looks like it wasn't another monitor, just Mr./Ms.
Telnet & me. Sucks to you, Telnet. (not "sucks to be",
just plain "sucks".)

Where's my coffee?

Sauna Time

Jun. 25th, 2005 09:13 pm
azurelunatic: Log book entry from Adm. Hopper's command: "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found" (bug)
Came in to work this morning to the beginnings of a scene of chaos. There was much panicky yelping about the temperature in the server room.

A room containing running computers should not go over 70°F, common sense tells me. At 7 this morning, our server room was at 95°F. There was much scrambling around in search of fans to get the place cooled down. I went in the server room for the first time ever, a great large room with a number of racked computers and all sorts of nifty shiny things, and I was too busy looking for unoccupied outlets to plug the fans into to properly appreciate the sheer geek heaven of the room. This is a level of geekiness entirely surpassing some of my previous levels. The doors of the place were propped open, which is generally a no-no, but these were special circumstances.

Checking people in, somewhat later, went far more smoothly than Friday. I was able to disentangle myself from Situations Needing Supervisor by summoning the actual supervisor for the jobs, and was back in the bullpen sorting out who was logged in and who was not logged in by 8:45-ish, which was also about when the A/C tech steamed by on his way to the server room. (The Dave Matthews Band Fan Geek was already in, and was on his way to a state of high panic about his overheating charges.)

At about 8:55, we got the notice that we needed to log everything off NOW.
"We have people on interviews!"
"Log. Off. Now."
"Even the supervisors?"
"We're having data loss in here. Everything gets shut down. Now."

I had the presence of mind to screen-scrape the login data for the whole room, the session I'd grabbed before all the shit started going down, and paste it into a hasty Word file, then print it before everything went down. That way, come hell or high water, I'd be able to identify the identities of the butts in seats from the start of the shift.

All the phone goons got sent on break for an hour to get them out of the way while IT and the air conditioner guy worked their assorted magic. One hour of downtime stretched into two. I was able to get all sorts of paperwork done.

I'm very good at keeping track of downtime. This is a good thing for accountability, but a bad thing to be in practice at.
azurelunatic: Log book entry from Adm. Hopper's command: "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found" (bug)
So this morning I dragged my happy ass into work, and about fifteen minutes into the shift, the dialer went "Ploink!" due to ...

... geeze.

Who would have thought that the same *#@!$ automatic software update would kill the system AGAIN??

[Poll #480807]

Fortunately, now that the problem is a known issue, it only took a half-hour, fifteen minutes to get in touch with the IT guy on duty, and 15 for the system to come back up again.
azurelunatic: Log book entry from Adm. Hopper's command: "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found" (bug)
I came in to work this morning after about four hours of sleep to learn that yeah, it was going to be a ten hour shift! Voluntary, of course. Since it was an impromptu shift extension, the phone goons didn't have to stay past their scheduled end of shift (eight hours) if they didn't want to, but supervisors and staff got to stay as long as there were phone goons to watch! Whee!

It was about that time that we, in the form of Cute Geek Super (followed by the rest of us), discovered that one of the computers in the back room, Tombstone, was inaccessible. (Someone in the company evidently thought it would be cute, or perhaps sufficiently interesting yet bland enough for Corporate, to name not only rooms, but also pieces of the computer system, after local geography. So we've got the Grand Canyon phone room, the Lake Havasu phone room, and then the box Tombstone (among many others) in the back computer room (which is doubtless named something else cute and local).) Tombstone holds certain crucial files, such as the supervisor memos, many shared documentation files, and, especially, my precious check-in hours spreadsheets!

This was only a minor inconvenience, I decided. I could use Excel and create a new spreadsheet and keep half track of things, at least until IT got the thing functioning. There had already been a few pages sent off to IT; they'd be there to fix things any time. I headed off to get people seated in their booths with far too much energy. (Stressy College Chick Super may or may not have noticed the coincidence between the timing of Figment's arrival and my perking way up.) I was ready for a very good shift.

That was about when the Cute Geek Super discovered that actually, when one tried to log in to go on the phones, one encountered certain dreadful and fatal errors, and could not actually get anything done. It seemed that the interviewing system also ran through Tombstone, which was proving to be a fairly deadly obstacle in our day.

IT had been paged at 7:45 when Tombstone was discovered to be down, and again at 8:00. By 8:15, some of us were getting annoyed when no one from IT had so much as called in to see what we were making a fuss over. Stressy College Chick Shift Ops Super was nervous when they still hadn't responded to the fourth page at 8:30, and called a head honcho, and they determined that if IT hadn't answered the fifth page (8:45) by nine, that Stressy College Chick was calling not one of the intermediate or junior IT guys, but the lead IT guy, at home. The rationale was generally that the page should have summoned whatever IT guy who was on duty to call in, and when five pages did not summon an IT guy, the head IT guy should know about this. Fires were evidently lit under the appropriate tails.

There was reasonably little for me to do, once I had determined that yes, all sixty-five phone goons who were in out of the eighty-odd who were scheduled in were sitting cooling their heels and collecting downtime pay, so I went out on the floor and wandered and played riot control. (I realized about two hours before shift end that I could have actually done some paper distribution as well, because there were performance memos still to hand out. Oops.) Figment was a Good Little Phone Goon and managed to finagle permission to go through training surveys (that portion of the system was live enough to work); the Stressy College Chick said that anyone who wanted to do training surveys could do so, on the reasonable grounds that hey, nothing else was going on...

By 9:15, we were reasonably assured that someone from IT was on his way. "How far out does he live?" "I dunno." I started up a new Excel spreadsheet and amused myself by trying to calculate the person-hours we'd already accumulated on System Is Down downtime (at a minimum of $8.50+$0.50 per person-hour). The total was not nice.

The plan for strategic retreat went something like this: if IT failed to show up and/or fix the problem by 10-ish, Stressy College Chick would obtain permission to try Cute Geek Super's proposed work-around, through the old piece of software (Lucent PowerDialer) that we hadn't used in years (and 3/4 of the phone goons never were trained on). Cute Geek Super would do a trial call to see if it took. If it took in the system, we'd wind up spending serious amounts of time getting the phone center trained on the software and operational, but we'd finally wind up limping towards productivity. If that failed, then everyone would wind up going home, and there would be an utter hours panic Sunday and so on to the end of the month.

By 9:45, IT still wasn't there. I did my level best to keep those phone goons around me informed of the situation, and keep the noise level down to a dull roar. I poked at my spreadsheet.

IT, in the person of the 30-something young man with the sandy hair in the business haircut (the one who'd so famously knocked over his chair and huffed off with one of the computers tucked under his arm), was finally routed out of bed and showed up, insufficiently caffienated and with a rumpled iteration of one of his usual crisp button-down shirts (gaping at the neck instead of buttoned up all the way), around 10:10 or so. I wandered off the floor back into the bullpen to see what was up. IT took stock of the situation and disappeared into the back. I sat down at my desk and fiddled with the lame spreadsheet I'd concocted, to see if I could make it start adding things better, and keep track of the mounting tally of downtime, and took the internal phone call from the machine room at 10:14.

The system was back up.

IT re-appeared as the entire call center got itself set up, logged in, turned on, and dialing within what looked like a record five minutes. It seemed that Tombstone had unbooted itself in the process of processing an automatic update sometime Friday night, but had not rebooted for Saturday morning. "I keep telling them that having them do automatic updates Friday night is stupid," IT lamented. "They should do them Thursday night, that way we'll be here in the morning to deal with things if anything goes wrong, instead of having them do it on Friday when we won't be here Saturday morning."

$1161+ later, maybe they'll take his suggestion...
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
I've been reading fanfic and so forth. [livejournal.com profile] marxdarx was dreadfully bored. I traumatized him with Snarry and H/D images and H/D fic. Hee.

V came over and we worked on her computer (the USB card seems to be intractable in her system, which sucks large quantities of horseshit milkshake through a vacuum cleaner hose, but the monitor works again) and then after not much happened, we wound up grocery shopping.

We tend to do that when we're stressed out from working on computers.

The system is, of course, down. Poor LJ. Internap's power -- all of it -- went out. Sizzle, fizzle. Here's hoping it'll be back up soon.
azurelunatic: Log book entry from Adm. Hopper's command: "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found" (bug)
3:32. A call from the office. Guuuuuss what? *throws lightswitch rave, finishes nap*

I'm not scheduled in tomorrow, because I'll be packing to go home to Alaska for vacation, but if I do have time to, you know, come in and work, that would be awesome and I should give the office a call...
azurelunatic: Log book entry from Adm. Hopper's command: "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found" (bug)
Called in at 12:30 to check on the status of the night shift. Unknown. The office person said try back at 2.
Tried back at 2. Still unknown. Try back in ten minutes.
Tried back at 2:11. All lines busy, leave a message.
Tried back at 2:15. The 3pm shift comes in at 4:30, have a nice day.

So.

Unscheduled nap, happening in... now.

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azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
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