For the Love of Work

It's two in the morning. Do you know where you are?

Well, I'm at the customer data centre, sshing to a traffic analyzer, and updating some charging rules via a Java applet. I'm thinking what am I doing here? This is not my activity; I'm not being paid overtime; I'm not even supposed to be awake at this time of the morning. The customer is supposed to do it by themselves, but somehow they feel better with me on the conference bridge. Start of activity, my counterpart discovers the Java on his remote desktop is not working properly. He continues with it anyway, and messes up the rulebase. I tried to connect to the box via DSL through a VPN tunnel. Curious enough, the Java on our remote desktop in Europe isn't working, too. We got an Ops guy to try on his desktop. Fortunately his works, so we got him to make all the rule modifications for us. For verification, he emails us all a screenshot of the completed rulebase. A closer look at the status line shows that there's a problem with https, so the rules were not actually saved.

By now, my counterpart is not amused. He wakes up the IT guy and made him install a new version of Java on the remote desktop. Didn't work as now there's a version conflict. The IT guy says he'll look into it next morning. My counterpart smells blood and that's what he wants. He rings up the guy's supervisor. Remember this is around 1 am. The lady supervisor joins the bridge and she has no idea what is going on. I've been on the bridge for like 2 hours already, and I wonder what my monthly mobile bill is gonna be like. I just want to go to bed, so I offered to drive down to the data center and fix everything up.

Five minutes after I arrive, another guy drove in. Ah, it's the IT guy. Apparently, some things can't wait till morning. He got off the correct Java version from me, installed it on the server, and left. I fixed up the rulebase, and dialed back into the bridge. My counterpart is not there. Nor is he answering his 3G phone or his XDA. Jeez! The guy dropped off to sleep again!

Gosh, I love my work.