18 Problems Only Tech Support Workers Will Understand

4. Getting A Call At 3am And Rebuilding A Datacentre Before 8am

Any tech support engineer who has ever worked an oncall shift knows the dread of that phone ringing at 3 am and waking you from your already fitful and nervous slumber. No phone call at 3 am was ever good news but when you€™re on-call it can mean anything from a password needing reset or a server rebooted, all the way up to an entire datacentre going boom. A well known insurance company who shall remain nameless felt it sensible to build a datacentre under a pond. The folly of this should be obvious to any high school physics student but nevertheless, there it was. Who would have expected it flood? So when the phone call comes through and the fate of the company is on your shoulders it tends to focus the mind pretty quickly. What are the core systems, what are the DR procedures, which services have failed over and which need brought up as a priority? All of these questions fly through the mind with the added thought that a wrong move could cost millions. The staff coming in at 8am and being able to log in have no idea of the heroics and process breaking steps you had to take to make that possible, nor the sheer scale of documentation and retrospective changes you need to fill in. But such is the life of the humble techie.