Major Outage....
Whilst working as 2nd/3rd line techy for a large out-sourcing company, this happened one day.

We were all told that the new, female, IT director ( bow down - we're not worthy) would be visiting us today and we had to be on our best behaviour.

It was a normal sort of day. Once the early morning rush of fucktards who couldn't remember their passwords was over, it was situational normal.

Then I wee little red light started to flash on my desktop. I looked up at the call queue and every operator was busy and more calls were coming in..

"Emma" I shouted... "Come off the lines and talk to me" - Emma was the firstline supervisor...

"We're getting hammered from all over the country with people who can't open their email..." she said.

"OK - stay off the lines and get ready to record a voice message"

I quickly brought up a command prompt.

c:\ping the datacenter

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 192.168.0.17:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

I quickly remoted onto a machine down south while telling Ben, my sidekick to try from Devon and the results were the same. We'd lost the datacenter in Sheffield where all of the servers lived.

"Emksi! I yelled

"Yo"

"OK, bitch - get a message recorded and on the lines saying we have a major outage and we expect it be resolved in the next 30 mins. Updates will be provided by their local IT people every 20 minutes. Please do not call us."

"on it" she yelled

"PFY?" - (my trainee Legless) "Get a hold of Sheffield and find out what the fuck is going on..."

And more of this madness including cascading sms messages out to all of our clients, ramming a message up on one of our unofficial webservers and altering al of the local DNS servers to reflect that this was now the company's Itranet server....

A frenetic hour.

Then, we got called to say the the Sheffield centre was back online and to message all companies and team leaders that all was back.

I slumped back in my chair.

"Fuck me - we did well there" I thought

"Legless?" I heard my boss call "Could you come here please?

I then had a 20 minute dressing down from the new head of IT for calling Emma a bitch. It was only resolved when Emma was called in to ask if that term offended her.

"Only as much as me calling him an ancient Geordie Wanker" she sniffed. "If he'd really offended me he'd be wearing his balls as a tie"

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Sat 5 Sep 2009, 12:32, 2 replies)

excellent!
Just goes to show how little managers know about their employees banter - especially when the pressure's on..

I was actually panicking for you, reading this post.

Here's a click
*klik!*
(danniekavanagh did nothing constructive on, Sat 5 Sep 2009, 16:49, closed)

I had a somewhat similar experience last year
I went for a job interview, thought I was doing okay, and then the two Hausfraus who were conducting the interview started asking questions designed to see how pc I was.

"What would you do if you were in the office and male co-workers were telling sexist jokes?"

"Well," says I, "I'd probably join in, to be honest. I like a laugh, and you never know, I might know some jokes they hadn't heard of."

I didn't get called back.
( b3th Not shit. Not mod., Mon 7 Sep 2009, 0:15, closed)