Mondays

It’s nothing specific to The Cube, but Monday’s are hell. I’m not sure what it is about sophisticated IT equipment, but something happens every weekend to make something fail spectacularly. Patches get rolled out and an entire office worth of computers crash. The email server, taking a well deserved siesta, wakes up late on Monday and sprains its ankle trying to catch up. It tends to claim it was “pushed down the stairs,” but we all know it’s in an abusive relationship. While it’s bad enough to have critical systems crash during the day when support groups are there and waiting for things to go bad, it’s a whole new game during the night shift.

Aside from the typical troubleshooting and ticket routing that the day shift does, the night shift is also responsible for monitoring critical systems. In other words, it’s my job to wake people up at night when things go bad. I’ve gotten cussed out, for waking people up, a surprisingly small number of times. The real problem comes when the people who are supposed to wake up when you call them don’t. Or they turn off their phones. Don’t return phone calls. The fun really starts to mount when the entire chain of command doesn’t answer their phone. Tonight was one of those nights.

To add to the teetering tower of mismanagement, tonight was also the celebration for the launch of a new, high profile product. This means that anyone who is answering their phone is sitting at a table with fine linen table clothes, real silver service, waiters with towels over the arms, and valet parking attendants out joy riding in their luxury vehicles. They’re also drunk. That part is kind of important, because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to think logically and trouble shoot a system that has crashed and costing a company a million dollars an hour while you’ve got 6 glasses of Dom Perignon under your belt. It’s not easy.

What makes all this worth being the person responsible for getting all these over paid draft dodgers in line is being held responsible when you do your job exactly as your being paid to, but no one else does. When the chain of command failed for 2 hours straight (that’s 2 million dollars lost) my desk began swarming with tipsy upper management types asking me what things aren’t going the way they envisioned them when they spent a whole 20 minutes 10 years ago deciding how the emergency contact system should work. At some point protocol goes out the door and you have to be blunt. Saying “I’m doing my goddamn job, maybe you should find a few more people who give a shit where it counts.” is not the answer.

Tomorrow should be fun…