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The phone rang. Jason stared at it for a long moment before answering. He held the handset away from his ear, as if it might leak something vile on him.
"DocGen is crashing," the caller complained. "And I've got 1,500 mailings that have to get out before the 6PM post."
Lennart wasn't quite out of college yet. He still had a semester to go after his co-op job, and he had used everything he'd learned from his Career Integration course to land a job with a respectably-sized, multi-national corporation. The position was end-user support for the company's Oracle installs. It wasn't an ideal position, especially considering some sentiments he agreed with-- but given the dry job market, he couldn't complain.
On his first day, he was given a desk, and a dust-coughing beige box. It was just like a computer, only slower. He spent the better part of the morning uninstalling a plethora of memory-hoggers. That, and rebooting. So much rebooting. Each uninstall brought him one logarithmic step closer to a usable computer.
"And this is Colossus," Eric said with a dramatic sweep of his hand.
It was an impressive sight. The PDP-11/70 was a beast of a machine: one megabyte of memory, up to 63 concurrent jobs, and a control panel straight out of straight out of Star Trek.
The list of things the Canadian government's IT group didn't like to see was a long list. High up on that list was "thirty-five contract developers sitting idle around a box of Tim Hortons donuts and racking up billable hours because they couldn't do any development with the DEV database out of commission".
A fantastic way to spend free time, if you can get it. It fell to Jody, junior DBA, to put an end to this. Before he even had time to grab coffee, he was investigating, "Error 04002, 'Unable to open file'" A quick check against the vendor's documentation gave him a few options: the datafile wasn't there, the drive was full, or there were insufficient file handles.
During water cooler conversation with his co-workers, whenever Dennis mentioned that he was responsible for supporting the Month End Closing system, reaction varied from a wide-eyed, agape look to a snide chuckle.
The Month End Closing system had a reputation throughout the department of being an ancient and legacy application that management had refused to upgrade over the years. Some of the comments put its true age at somewhere in the late 80’s early 90’s era which had earned it nicknames like “Ol’ Bertha” or “Methuselah” but most simply called it the “Legacy Dung Heap”.
Have your own fun support stories? Send 'em on over!
Mr. Keyboard (from Derek)
I used to be a Genius™. Not an actual genius, mind you, but just a tech support guy who worked at the Apple Store and, therefore, got the prestigious title of Genius™.
When applying, Rick appreciated Steve's interviewing style. They had a half-hour chat over coffee and he walked out with a job offer. It seemed pleasant and homey, an inviting workplace. After getting hired, Steve proved to be a smart, hands-off boss, who was a pleasure to work for. He was The perfect chief for a ramshackle web shop.
Mostly.
The Relational Database is dead.
It had a long, distinguished life that started in 1970 with Dr. Edgar F. Codd, but it has since seen its day. Like the sextant, slide rule, and punch card, relational databases are becoming relics of the past as the industry moves towards better, faster, and awesomer.
Mar 10