June 3, 1994
Dear Everyone:
Ever have one of those weeks when
everything goes wrong? Me,
too.
It started on Tuesday. It would
have started on Monday, except that Monday was a holiday.
Come to think of it, even Monday
was strange, whether-wise (an evil omen of things to come).
Around here, we’re not used to
overcast and humid, with temperatures in the high 80s.
Anyway, when we got into work on Tuesday, we were greeted with the news
that CRMIS had crashed. Panic
struck. People were calling at
6:00 in the morning to report that they couldn't get into the system.
Actually, it wasn't 6:00 their
time, just Pacific Time.
Never mind the grisly details of
why CRMIS failed; we're not pointing any
fingers here. Although there
is a certain CITC programmer out there who may find herself hanged
in effigy for assuming that she could just interrupt our system to do
some upgrading on the host overnight and think that no one would notice.
So a great deal of time, which had been planned for other things, had to
be spent on What Are We Going To Do Now That CRMIS Has Crashed?
The fact of the matter is, CRMIS used to blow up quite regularly.
When you came into work each
morning, the first thing you would ask was:
"Is the coffee ready and did
CRMIS update OK last night? Yes?
Hey, cool." Or, "No?
Bummer."
We were pretty blasé about the
whole thing.
But CRMIS has been behaving itself the past year or so, primarily
because we had finally worked most of the bugs out of the system.
We got used to thinking that it
would just work OK every night. I'm
sure the people of
Pompeii felt the same way about that nice, shady mountain out back.
On the other hand, CRMIS may have been waiting for just this opportunity
to kick up a fuss, since we have a big job to do between now and the 19th
of this month, a very tight deadline. You
know as well as I do that these computers listen to everything we say.
And they have a nasty sense of
humor.
But what the hey. All is not
lost. Well, actually, yes some
data has been lost (about
26,000+ boxes worth); but we'll find a way to put it all back together
again, like Humpty Dumpty. No
problem. (These new tranquilizers
work great, don't they?)
Then there's Spectrum. I got a
frantic call from a woman in “Pleasant Hill” who left the following
message on my voicemail:
"I try to update a Blanket Purchase Order" (a what?)
"And I got an error message.
90014."
(Is that a Zip Code?)
“FMBKHDR."
(Who?)
"EUROBAD."
(Where?)
"What does that mean and how soon
can you fix it?"
What does it mean?
It means, "Call your brother in
Wichita."
How the hell do
I know what it means?
But we got it taken care of. And
all it took was driving all the way out to “Pleasant Hill” and a
five-minute call to the software company.
Don't you just love weekends?
Love, as always,
Pete
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