the planning of small rodents

About 10 years ago, my employer introduced the concept of business-continuation for its mainframe. What that meant is that, should the big iron go belly up, we could easily resume our work on a backup mainframe. Back in those days of yore, I was our group's only mainframe programmer so, of course the business-continuation (hereafter referred to as BC) of its mainframe processing became mine. In the years that followed, I moved on to unix-based programming, but remained in charge of our mainframe support for its BC and normal daily maintenance (a fate hard to avoid since, like I said, I was and remain the group's only person knowing his/her way around mainframes). So, when the BC concept was expanded to include unix servers, you can guess who was given the duty to handle that at the end of 2006. (I didn't mind as this gives me a greater chance of not being given the boot.) Once our BC unix server was set up by the experts to have the same basic architecture as our real server, I began setting things up, for example our daily job flow. This wasn't a full-time job though, due to there being only a few of us to handle the group's other commitments, which were of a more pressing nature. Recently though, things happened that made the higher-ups very nervous. And so this unix BC task was given a higher priority. I did some testing of the basic job flow, and things worked the way they should. This gave yours truly and the higher-ups some confidence that we could switch from the real unix server to the BC one for a weekend tryout. I was in fact feeling such optimism that I was planning to intermittently monitor the job flow while catching up on my Doctor Who viewing.

Of course, on Saturday, I found myself working non-stop that whole day, starting at 4:30am. Some of the essential pieces that the Other Guys should have migrated from the real server to BC's were missing. Then other lacunae became obvious. To say that I was stressing out is an understaement, but I wrote to my friend Abi, who lives across the ocean and is in the same line of work, and her words of encouragement helped. It also helped my opinion of myself that I figured some of the problems and solutions all by myself. Eventually, things got resolved(1). At about 2am. I literally slept by my laptop, lying on top of my dogs's bed(2).

Yesterday was a lengthy monitoring of the remaining parts of the job flow, much smoother than Saturday's, followed by a meeting where my manager and my teammates(3) congratulated me. Today was a wrapup of what had happened, with my writing up a list of outstanding issues that must be resolved before we go thru this again for Scenario Two. Yes, this weekend was Scenario One. Thank goodness, I am not expecting Scenario Two to be anywhere near that difficult.

(…)

I can't believe I just wrote that.

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(1) My many thanks to my buddies who pitched in.

(2) They didn't mind as they were sleeping on my bed.

(3) Even the one who thinks I'm an idiot.