It could be the one I shoot off every so often, apologizing to all for not reading / commenting / etc. Then I'll get IMs, emails and comments telling me how I needn't worry, needn't apologize.

So I'm not.

Life is hectic. It's draining. It's trying. (It's trying to drive me bonkers, that's what it's trying to do.)

I had a minor victory yesterday and today. During my trip to WDW, I still checked emails, if only to be sure nothing blew up while I was gone.

Something blew up. (C'mon, with a buildup like that, you knew it was going to.) One of the computer clusters I 'own,' as in, "is responsible for the service software, assuming the underlying hardware, operating system and network are okay" went bang.

I work for a 'software as a service' product, so for a computer cluster that serves our product, if only in a testbed capacity, go down w/o reason is a bad thing. I emailed back that I was on vacation, but would look at it first thing.

As we all know, my return was delayed by a small family emergency. I get back into town Christmas Day. We opened presents in the hotel Christmas morning (you can imagine how Kitten was awake at dawn's early light.)

On 26 December, I'm in the office looking at this cluster. Actually, the boxen are in a data center many miles away. I'm looking at the logs, logging onto the boxen and trying various pokes and peeks.

I file a service ticket reporting a network issue.

At this point, you know the story: after some trials and travails, it turns out to be a network issue. I'm victorious, as promised above.

The gory details are that the Network group grabbed the service ticket, took a quick look at it and then closed it as "Won't fix" because it was by Ghod not a network issue.

Meanwhile, I'm a little distracted by family obligations, and most of my team is out for the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Yesterday, 2 January, I flail at it with all I could. I even went begging to the person I replaced (he left, designated me heir. Oh, fun.) At first, he was convinced it wasn't a network issue either, going so far as to post that on the service ticket. Hey, the guy's got 9 years experience with the product in its many incarnations, so his word is gospel, right?

Finally, by end of day, he thinks it could be a network issue as well. Sigh.

I'm glad it's done. I posted some very deliberately ambiguous emails announcing that the service was back up and available for testing. I say 'deliberately ambiguous' because I didn't want to start a blamestorm, but I certainly didn't want to fall on my sword for what was a spot-on diagnosis that simply wasn't heeded.

The general announcement was pretty easy. "It's up. thank you for your patience." The response to my manager's manager (and the separate one to his manager, who basically owns the whole product on the org chart) was more ... diplomatic. Remember, "diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell and having them look forward to the trip." I had to still be deliberately ambiguous, but not as ambiguous.

Anyhow, the chunk of test resources that I own works, most of the way. It was down for two weeks, which is utterly unacceptable in the services world. Fortunately, it's a test resource, not a production service. Unfortunately, it is customer-visible, at least to a certain subset of customers who are helping us test the product.

Basically, the risks are that the product looks bad to these external customers helping us test, and that I look like an idiot for not being able to wave my hand and get things fixed like the old guy could.

Still, I count this as a victory. Hopefully, the right people realize that I'm not the one who blew it out of the water, as I don't have admin rights on the network gear; that I had a good idea where it was broken; and that I wasn't the reason it took a week after I filed the initial service ticket to get resolved.

Most importantly, I want to be sure I don't sound like some responsible-phobic brownnoser. In past jobs, I've owned up to my mistakes, and I've had customers come to my defense because of that: "If he caused this, he would have said so. He didn't, so I know he's not the cause."

Anyhow, I'm too stressed and frustrated to compose this in my mind, or even to hone it as I spew it onto the compose window.

Sorry for the random spewage. While I'm at it, sorry for not reading your blogs, not commenting, not emailing, and not IMing. ;)

Hugs, all!