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Apr 09Infinity Nines of Uptime
by in Feature Articles on 2009-05-28Working freelance for a small, three-person company named StruggleCo, Ivey saw firsthand how they struggled to make do. Part of this involved understanding StruggleCo's terminology for things. For example, though he was retained on an hourly, as-needed basis, Ivey was StruggleCo's Senior Network Engineer. Whenever Gary, the owner, needed to "consult with legal", that actually meant Googling for boiler-plate legal documents. And when Gary said "data center with offsite backup", he really meant "the broom closet and basement."
At least, that had been the case for as long as Iven could remember. But after been fighting a long, uphill battle against some larger competitors, StruggleCo finally landed a huge contract (for them) with a medium-sized company we'll call MediumCo. And this time, they would do things right.
Dan Wiebe had grown all too familiar with the routine of the 2:00 AM phone call. Bbbbrrrrrdddddiiiing. What the – huh? Bbbbrrrrrdddddiiiing. Oh, great. What time is it? Bbbbrrrrrdddddiiiing. Okay, okay, I’m coming! Bbbbrrrrrdddddiiiing. Please be a wrong number, "Hello?"
A few years back, Brian F. was doing some consulting for a small web startup that was trying to build a platform for struggling artists to sell their music online. After about a year of "nothing of significance" (READ: they ran out of money before signing on any customers), there was little left for Brian to do and his billable hours were "indefinitely" reduced to zero. However, a year after leaving, the CEO called Brian to say that said investors had been found and that he needed some help taking his vision to the next stage.
John was in bed, nearly ready to turn out the light when his wife — who had been burning the midnight oil in the computer room — rushed in.
AwesomePro 2.0 had it all – the low price of a mom-and-pop software company, 24/7 support, and a surprisingly robust feature set. Their presentation to the higher-ups couldn't have gone better, with the bigwigs ready to whip out the checkbook before it was even over. AwesomePro were light years ahead of the competition at literally a fifth of the price. It would be the perfect fit to replace the aging and temperamental in-house ERP solution in use by one of Stewart T.'s clients.
All of the terminals in the warehouse had two things in common: one, they needed to be air-dusted frequently because of all the cardboard fibers and dust in the warehouse, and two, they had all accumulated an impressive pile of masking tape labels written in Sharpie. The labels were like the rings of a tree, revealing the history of the system. You could peel back the label INITWAREHS07 to reveal that the system used to be X-DATAPROC, before that it was SYSXDS, and before that it was ENIAC.
Pete and his manager Dick were ACME Corporation's version of The Odd Couple. They both shared in the support and maintenance of a monstrous in-house spawned order processing / network monitoring / invoice printing / slashy / slash / slash system written in Visual C++. However, while Pete kept up in the latest technology trends and was always on the lookout for new solutions to old problems, Dick was a very conservative manager with twenty-five company years under his belt. To Dick, "change" was only a Good Thing when it added up to 65¢, which was the exact amount required to buy a ginger ale from the soda machine. What kept Pete and Dick from being a perfect couple was that Dick was Pete's supervisor and often times, he got his way.
Although Douglas Mezzer’s housemate had moved out many months ago, there was one recurring reminder of his prior residence: the monthly DSL bill from iiNet. Though Douglas had been paying on time every month, Douglas thought it’d be best if the bills came addressed to him instead of his former housemate. He figured it’d be a simple change that could all be accomplished through the self-service account management website.
Graham K. was working for an atmospheric chemistry research group in a university in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. They'd been running a field experiment in sugar cane fields on a government research farm that was roughly 1500km (~932mi) away in Mackay.
Except for the dryers being infamous for not performing their most basic task – drying –students at the Sogn Student Village near the University of Oslo were happy with how the laundry system worked. Just swipe your laundry card and run load, and the charges are conveniently billed along with the rent. Neat. But of course, all good things must come to an end.
Steve had been passing by SecuriTek's in-your-face full-sized billboard job ad every day for nearly a month. They utilized the "geek appeal" of twisted logic puzzles and obtuse syntax to lure in candidates with perks in their "laid back yet professional" environment. However, along with their promises of catered lunch wishes and every-day-is-casual-day dreams, the advertisements made one thing perfectly clear - only the best and brightest C/C++ developers on the planet should apply. Thinking Hey! I'm a Top-Tier kind of guy and What the heck...I don't have anything to lose Steve decoded an obfuscated HR email address (ROT13? C'mon...) and sent off his resume.