Major Outage Tech Support Blues
by Robert Wynne
Music: “California Dreaming” (John Phillips)
© 1996

All the servers down
My Netscape screen is grey
I can’t get logged in
For several hours today
I wouldn’t be so stressed
If I was off today
Customers are screaming
And I don’t know what to say

I called down to the NOC
It’s just 5 miles away
Got down on my knees
And I began to pray
Hey, Mr. Sysop, what’s the story?
Don’t say it’s down to stay
Customers are screaming
Please tell us what to say

(Interlude)

Got an update from the NOC
“We don’t know what to say…
Seems the password file is missing
But we’ve found a way
To get it from the tape
By the next business day…”
Customers are screaming
And there’s nothing we can say
Customers are screaming
And there’s nothing we can say
And there’s nothing we can say
And there’s nothing we can say
Yes, it’s based on a true story. I was a supervisor in the technical support department of an ISP when I wrote this song. They really did delete the RADIUS password file, and it really did take until the next day to recover. I actually wrote this on the way home from work at one in the morning. It took an hour and twenty minutes for me to drive from the office to home, and I had no writing utinsils or recording gear, so I had to sing it over and over again until I got to my computer where I could write it down.

This is one of the few pieces of songwriting I have which survived my 1998 apartment fire, mostly be virtue of having been e-mailed to other people who were also on duty for that tech support shift.