h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today I start a week on call. If anything serious happens to the office IT systems at any time of the day or night, then they'll ring me and I'll have to get it fixed.

When the phone rings at some unearthly hour - as it will - frequently - the first voice I hear is usually someone from our Asian help desk, telling me there's a problem. As they are from our out-of-hours desk, they are untrained. All they have is a number to ring - mine - and a report of some catastrophe or other.

Well, I say catastrophe. Yes, we get network failures, and storage farm crashes and critical applications going belly up, but my number is also used by company directors and their PAs. When they have a problem, no matter how small, they can ring the number and get me out of bed. I'm as likely to be asked to help people with their telephony or pc desktop problems as with some major IT infrastructure failure.

The first thing I do is try to get out of bed and make it downstairs without waking the wife. This is tricky. If I speak I'll wake her. If I don't, the caller may hang up while I'm creeping around half-asleep in the dark.

I then establish whether this is really a call-out, or, as I vainly hope, some cruel prank which will allow me to get back to bed. As the people I speak to often have poor English, I usually tell them I'll contact them on instant messaging in 5 minutes, when I've booted the computer up. It's odd how some people can hardly string two spoken words together, but when they're typing their English is excellent.

Now, I don't fix the problems myself - I have a list of technical experts who are also on call, some from Asia, others from the UK. I work out which part of the IT infrastructure isn't working and ring the engineer responsible. This isn't always straightforward. Some people don't wake up, and we have to ring alternatives. Sometimes I'm ringing absolutely anyone I can think of in the hope they've left their phone on. Amazingly, I usually find someone, and they're often very happy to help.

While I wait for them to get online, I'll open up a conference call, so we can all discuss the problem. In fact I have two phones so I can keep a conference call running but still be contacted by anyone. I'll also get a group instant message going too. It all gets a bit complicated at times.

When we're agreed there is a problem I send out text messages to senior management saying we're trying to fix a major incident. I use an app which manages text messages to groups.

And then it's all hands to the pumps as we try to get the systems back up and running again. Often we need to call out hardware and software vendors to help us. Sometimes senior management join the conference call and offer what they consider to be constructive criticism. It's my job to stay on top of it all and keep everyone informed.

In the end, most problems get fixed, usually within an hour or two. In the worst cases I may get simultaneous incidents to manage, or be up all night and have to hand over to someone the next morning so I can get some sleep.

So, that's what I've got to look forward to this week. Apart from the lack of sleep, most incidents are fairly straightforward, but It can be a lonely place at 3am when you get a call telling you the corporate network is down.

I'm also on support from Thursday for a week, Icy, but I'm the techie guy who fixes a particular type of problem. I'm not the front end guy who gets all the calls. If a problem gets to me, it almost always is one I can sort out. If it's not, I just refer it back to the front end guy and go back to sleep.

I hope you're being paid well for your week.

Reading that I could feel that cold shiver of fear that I left behind a few years ago. Luckily I was never the first port of call, more a member of the party crashing around the undergrowth desperately searching for clues, but from time to time it could get 'exciting'.

As Terry Pratchett said 'May you live in unexciting times'

The pay is a pittance, unfortunately. I'm not sure why I put up with it, to be honest with you. I'll probably soon start looking for something less stressful or more rewarding.

Does the phone ringing not wake your wife?

Oddly, it's the talking that wakes her.

That, and tripping over things and falling down the stairs.

My sympathies. But thanks for explaining to the rest of us how that works.

We'll be more considerate next time, when yelling, 'Hey! why is this down?'

I remember when my first daughter was a baby, if she woke in the middle of the night, and I got up to sort her out, I was OK and could get back to sleep. But if Mrs G woke up and spoke to me, I wouldn't then be able to get back to sleep. My brain would switch into full awake mode and it could take me an hour or two to get back to sleep.

[SQ]

reddit

Deb

[Amy P]

[[[ asteroidlil ]]] fashionably late

*is happy she's responsible for two systems used during office hours in the local time zone*