just another day in my life

[grrltechie.livejournal.com]

Work conversation from earlier today:

Network Guy:  We are about to do something disruptive*.
Me:  Wha?
NG:  Did boss not tell you about it?
Me:  No
NG:  .....*laughs*.  Well, we are going to do something disruptive, but it shouldn't cause any problems.

And of course I got about 20 phone calls from users who were completely disrupted.  I.E. knocked off the network, lost work and were unable to get back on our primary (HIS) software.

Both pieces, not being told anything and the NG screwing things up after saying what he was doing wouldn't screw anything up, are completely typical.  And large pieces of why I am utterly burned out on this job.

*in this case the something disruptive was rebooting the core switch.  Ya know, the one that everybody goes through to authenticate to the network?  On the one hand, we have 2 and they are supposed to be set up to provide redundancy.  On the other hand, I don't think that redundancy has ever actually been tested.  Before today.  And, wow.  Redundancy FAIL.

So I'm thinking it might have been a good idea to treat this like a short down time, by, oh I don't know, warning people they might lose network connectivity and therefore our HIS software.  Because that's what it turned out to be, only it was UNPLANNED down time and oh did the users get upset.