Gwnewch y pethau bychain

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Tuesday was certainly a mix of a day. On the whole, it was positive, but…

As some of you know, the giant soul-consuming project at work is the relocation of our data centre to a new location. When we first moved into this building 6 years ago, there really was no cost-effective alternative for hosting an operations centre the size of ours besides simply building your own facility. This has changed in recent years, and we’ve entered into an arrangement with a co-location facility which will offer us a lot of things we’ve always wanted, but couldn’t afford. It really is a first class facility, and I’m happy to have use of it.

Unfortunately, the downside is that we actually have to move all our stuff there, while causing as little disruption as possible to our existing customers. We’ve been preparing for this for several weeks, and now have come to the actual shifting of servers, which will occur in phases over the next 4 weeks. Phase one was Tuesday morning.

I woke up a little before midnight, snuggled a bit with kitanzi before getting up and having “breakfast”. I arrived at my office a little before 1am, before anyone else arrived. I started going over my prep stuff and making sure I had my ducks in a row. While there are bound to be some bumps in any operation of this magnitude, I wanted to make sure as few of them as possible were my fault. 🙂

When the rest of the moving party had arrived, we got to work. I had made the moving of one particular piece of gear my personal responsibility. It’s a network-attached filer, that we’ve had for several years, and which hosts the content of all our commercial web accounts. We had decided to move the commercial web first, since it was one of the bigger PITAs of the whole operation, and we wanted to get it out of the way. I was worried about the filer mostly because none of us had ever disassembled and reassembled it before — when it was installed, it was installed by one of the vendor’s engineers, and every major upgrade of it had also been done by the vendor. So this had the potential to be a big learning experience.

We got everything dismantled and loaded into a couple of trucks, then headed over to the new facility, about half an hour away. Checked in through various physical security points. (There are three doors that you have to provide both an id card AND a biometric scan before you get onto the data floor. For some reason, this always makes me hum the Get Smart theme.) For some reason, there was a bit of a delay actually getting our equipment checked into the building, but it finally arrived and I set about reassembling the filer. For all my worries, it actually came back up with relatively little fuss, and no errors. I was majorly relieved.

Ironically, however, the filer — the ONLY thing I had been seriously worried about in this operation — was the ONLY thing that went completely right. Every other server came up complaining of wanting manual fscks. One server had died completely. The servers which needed fscks didn’t seem to want to recognize their root passwords, making me afraid that I had misremembered them. (Ultimately, it must have been me mistyping them, as I finally got in and the machines up and running, but not before I had sent someone back to the old office to get a Solaris disk I could recover the passwords from. Yes, we should have brought that along in the first place.)

There were firewall issues, and we had to recover the dead server’s configs onto a different machine (luckily, we had a webserver that had not yet been put into production, so that was made very easy). There were routing problems and confusion and lots and lots of fun. Finally, it was getting up on 1pm, and we called for relief in the person of my beautiful and talented college, eloren. When she arrived, we briefed her on the outstanding issues, and then headed home to get some rest.

I was looking forward to the evening! Around 8am, I had slipped out for some fresh air and to give a phone call to kitanzi, who had been expecting an early morning phone call, and I wanted to see if she had gotten the news from it we were hoping for. I got her about 10 minutes before she had to leave for work, and she confirmed the excellent news: she was formally offered the job she had interviewed for on Friday! An offer letter was to arrive the next day, and her first day of work at her new job was to be October 13! We made plans to go out for sushi to celebrate that evening!

Unfortunately, as good as I felt about the state of the world, I was entirely too tired. I decided that I would stop and pick up a light lunch on my way home, and headed down Windward Parkway to Planet Smoothie. I almost got there.

I’m still not exactly sure what happened. All I know is I realized a split-second too late that the traffic in the lane I was in had stopped moving. I slammed on brakes and didn’t quite avoid running into the backend of a Lincoln Aviator.

*sigh* After checking that no one was seriously hurt, i called 911 and waited for the police to arrive. They took their time about it, but finally showed up, and we moved off into the parking lot nearby so she could write up the accident report. I received a ticket for “following too closely”, which I intend to pay without argument, but it was a serious bad end of the day. I sincerely hope that the lady I hit (who was very pregnant) was in fact OK — she was going off to get checked over by her doctor as soon as the police let us go.

I went home, called my insurance company, and set everything in motion to get my car fixed. I got a call back from the body shop who indicated that I could bring my car over that afternoon, and went to do that, then came back home.

I’m trying very hard not to let this get me down. We *still* went out to celebrate Kit’s new job, and had a good time doing it. (I waited until she got home to tell her what happened — I didn’t want to bring her mood down any sooner than was absolutely necessary). I especially want to think tigerbright for spending some time keeping me from spiraling completely out of control — by the time Kit got home, I was still miserable, but not as completely depressed as I had been earlier in the afternoon, when I was literally falling apart and playing the lovely self-blame game. Thanks, love, I owe you one. (*smooch*)

So, that’s the news from here. I still count it as an overall positive day. The accident is only a today problem, and Kit’s new job will reward us for years to come, so that’s a net win, don’t you think? I keep telling myself that. I hope that someday very soon I’ll actually believe it.

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19 Comments

  1. See the bright side of it: the lady was pregnant before you hit her.
    Sorry, cried out for me. :o/

  2. Sorry to hear about the accident, but you’re right that it’s outweighed by all the good news. Said good news includes the fact that you both walked away from the accident without injury. Cars can be fixed; people are harder.

  3. Well, that’s a *day*! I am very glad you’re safe and that the lady in the other car is too.

    *big tight hug*

    A.
    thinking of you

  4. Hey, holding friends up when they need it is part of the job description. Glad I was helpful. *hugs*

  5. *hughughughughug*

  6. So sorry to hear about your accident, but glad that you’re ok. I rear-ended someone last year (totalling my car), and I was very glad to know I’d not hurt anyone. The worst part other than that was the subsequent paperwork…

    Congrats on all the other good things, and I agree that the balance is definitely on the plusful side :-).

  7. Definitely a net win, I’d say, though I can see why the accident would overshadow everything else in the immediate aftermath. Congratulate Kit for me 🙂 *hug*

  8. Yay on the new job for Kitanzi!
    Sorry about the accident. Blech. FWIW I doubt the accident hurt the pregnancy. If it was just a fender bender she was probably fine assuming she was wearing a seatbelt in the proper way (low under the tummy).
    But I imagine you will be very relieved to hear if she was fine.

    What you need is a good giggle loop.
    Hugs!!!!!!!!!!!

  9. I’m so sorry about the accident.

    Yay for Kitzani!!!

  10. Wow! What a mix. First . . . *tight hug* for the sucky wreck. And I thought not knowing to pump the brakes after they’d been fixed and rolling backwards out of my driveway into my In-Laws’ car was bad! I’m very glad she and you are safe and okay. Atlanta traffic frankly terrifes me.

    And congrats to ! Yay! That is wonderful news. *warm happy hug* for that.

  11. Ack! *HUGS YOU LOTS* Glad -you- are ok, too. *massages all the post-wreck tension stress away* -H…

  12. I often wonder why life works that way. I get something really really good that happens to me, puts me in a euphoric state, and then something else happens that sends me crashing back to earth, and sometimes back into it. I’m almost afraid to feel joyful because I know that once I go over that crest, I’m gonna hit the trough.

    But as other people have already said, the important part is that no one got hurt except the cars.

  13. *hugs*
    accidents suck, I am very glad to hear you are ok!

  14. *bhigghugs*, dear one. Accidents suck, but as these things go I agree with all that’s been said -- cars can be fixed, even if it costs annoyingly much.

    YAY on the great news for Kitanzi -- and yes, that’s plenty of reason to balance the day positive and celebrate. As you say -- the accident is in the past, the job is now and in the future.

    For a min-cheerup you get the actual “me” userpic with a smile that I hope will infect you to smile too… *morehugs*

  15. *comfortingsmooch* and *happycuddles* to both of you … yeah, late, I know, but better late than never, ain’t it? *hugs*

  16. *hugs*

    That’s a heckuva day, dude. *hug* But as others have said, in the long run, what you’ll remember is Kit’s new job. Hang in there! And give ‘er congrats for my folk.

  17. Man, what a day! I’m very glad that neither you nor the pregnant lady were injured, and, as everyone has pointed out, cars can be fixed. Hope the rest of the week is better. And congrats to Kit!

    *hugs*

  18. I’m just glad you’re okay.

    *hugs*
    LMG

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