Thursday, September 21, 2006

Tired of Talking on the Phone

I was on a conference call for hours today. The call had nothing to do with me, but I was there as a resource in case someone needed to ask me a question. I leaned back in my chair and put my feet on my desk. Sometime later I woke myself up snoring. Not sure how long I had been out but the call droned on..."shouldn't we have known this beforehand that this could have been an issue.....well if we had done so and so, would it have made a difference in the outcome????"
I had a momentary urge to stick a #3 pencil into my eye.....up to the eraser. I wanted to say that sometimes things breakdown and we don't know why but apparently some people don't deal well with ambiguity. "What will I tell the customer????" one of the participants asked...nay almost pleaded. A thought came to mind: If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them will bull manure. Well you see sir sun spots were quite active today and a free radical neutrino hit our system board at the speed of light tripping the jump bit on the internal clock timing interface which cause a reciprocal data flow ecache memory error and this resulted in a system panic and subsequent outage. You did study quantum physic in high school didn't you sir?
After the call, I almost sprinted out of the building....I decided to head out a few minutes early and once outside, my mood changed. The sun was warm and there was a slight breeze out of the northwest. The sky was clear as crystal. I heard a distint honking sound from above. Up in the sky I saw a V of ducks headed south for the winter.
I'm off tomorrow but the weatherman says it's going to rain. That's OK with me. I plan to kick back and let Jilda do the talking on the phone tomorrow.

2 comments:

  1. Ah yes. It's endemic through out the world isn't it? Did you mean to write outage or outrage? :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12:17 PM

    Rick,
    I see things have have changed very little since I fell(jumped?) out of the nest 18 months ago. I would like to add something to your "on target" explanation of the system outage. The problem would have been avoided if only the system operators had entered the "SHIELDS UP" command at the time the system was booted up.
    Also, if there was enough redundancy in computer equipment there would never be any system failures. This would require a charge of approximately $10,000 for a one minute phone call. Maybe the person needing to explain the outage to their customer could look at it from that perspective.

    ReplyDelete

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