Saturdays are really good. Especially when they come at the end of a long week. Especially if they come at the end of a very long two weeks. Saturdays for me mean that you can stay up late the night before and then sleep until 2:30 or so. This accomplishes two things:it allows for me to have alot of time to have some recreation,a.k.a. video games and friends coming over. Then,it allows me to sleep enough to recover from that and the week before,somewhere along the lines of 12 hours.
Anyway,now onto why the last two weeks were very long.
Things didn’t start off too bad. they were rather quiet and calm. Katrina was all in the news and there was all the political bantering about that going on (which I don’t mind,I happen to be a fan of political banter and will probably post a bit on that at a later time). I had a coupple things that I was working on at work,but I had a couple weeks to finish them. About Tuesday we noticed that there was a hurricane out in the Gulf called Rita. We had a little meeting,if it becomes a category 3,we’ll shut the servers down on Friday,if it’s a cat 4 or 5 we’ll shut them down on Thursday,etc. We made all the applicable jokes,about weather we were going to drink hurricanes or margaritas. Then we all went home content that we had done all that we needed to do and tomorrow would be a good day.
Boy was I wrong.
I walk in Wednesday morning,everyone is going crazy,and all of my bosses are in a meeting about the hurricane. Rita hadd pumped up a couple of cats overnight,and that had everyone worried. We ended up deciding to move all of our servers downtown to a hardened data center. We planned that we might not be able to get to the office for three weeks. We moved everything out of the offices with windows,which is more then half of the offices. It was a very long day. Moving the servers was a lot of fun. We had 3 racks of servers,which are normally all tied together with KVM cables,Network cables,power cords to the wall,even a couple optical lines. Of course,we had to undo all of that. Then we had to move them. These things weighed in at about a half ton apiece. Fortunately,we had the help of a couple movers. So,we rolled off the intellectual property of our company,all of the livelihood of our business,and put it into a truck which we watched drive off towards downtown Houston. This made me,if not all of us,the slightest bit nervous. Some of my co-workers followed the truck down to get things set back up,and I stayed behind to man the phones. I stayed late,but the folks that were downtown didn’t leave until after midnight,and took an hour and a half to get home. Thursday we all worked from home,and had conference calls and such. I had a lot of calls,because I had the on call phone,and people were having trouble connecting to the VPN and such. It was also a long day. Our family decided to make preperations on Friday. In between phone calls I was helping carry stuff downstairs,and boarding up windows. My mom had packed all this stuff in an emergency Tupperware tub,and included a portable hard drive I lent her to back up her stuff. Then the “hurricane”came through. Fortunately,we missed most of the worst of the storm,it went east of where we were,so we were on the clean side. All it really did to us was make a big mess out of our patios and lawn,covering them with tree branches and the like. Also,it knocked the power out for about 12 hours,which was manageable. My dad loved it. He used a Coleman stove that we had to boil water for their coffee,then he cooked us eggs and sausage on the grill with our cast iron Dutch oven lid. He’s kinda nutty about cooking and eating outside. After that,we had a half a week of 100 degree weather to help us out with the cleanup process. It also forced Entergy into a series of rolling blackouts that resulted in us being glad that we had moved the servers downtown. We moved all the stuff back into people’s offices,and got everyone back up and working again,until we started getting affected by the blackouts at the office. The blackouts were a real pain for us,but they were more of a pain for other folks. Some people lost power for stretches of 13-15 hours at a time,ruining all the food in refrigerators and freezers. People’s air conditioning went out because of the bad power. Fortunately,Thursday had a cool front roll in and saved everyone some AC time and saved Entergy some Power. Since then the power hasn’t gone out,but we decided that we’re going to move operations to a bunker so that we can make sure that we can still work if the power goes out again at the office. Add to that the things that I had to get done by the end of the week and a couple more that they decided to add,and it’s been a very busy and stressful two weeks.
you just need more stress relief!!!