August 20, 2003
MELTDOWN!
Our mainframe went down last night, and wasn't back up until 9 AM this morning. Which means we had a couple of hundred trains barrelling around the country and the operations center had no frigging clue where they were. Which means you had a bunch of engineers coming up on junctions and the switches weren't thrown. Which means these trains went into lockdown to avoid head-on collisions, and the crews went looking for coffee and doughnuts. THE GRID WENT DOWN! It was a CASCADE EFFECT! Or a zipper effect, as I like to call it, in homage to the zipperheads who designed the system.
So The Company sent out an urgent alert this morning advising customers that these latest nefarious viruses had corrupted our mainframe and caused this, this abomination! Bullshit. I got the skinny. It wasn't viruses. It was a mouse. A mouse crawled into the mainframe and fried his ass, and took us out. Who's going to tell their customers that? Not us.
A small microcosm of what went down last week in the Midwest and Northeast. Spend capital on terminals and offices and buildings, and let your transmission lines, or in our case line-of-road and mainframe, degenerate. You spend the money on what's sexy. A nuclear power plant is sexy. A transmission line is not. A corporate office or state-of-the art terminal is sexy. Crossties and mainframes stuck in a backwater facility in Baltimore are not.
Of course, equipping the locomotives with GPS... never mind. Layoffs are tomorrow, and I'm already pushing it.
So Kim, you're saying a fried mouse is sexy?
Just kidding, couldn't come up with any other answer than that...;)
Posted by: Laura at August 20, 2003 8:06 PMWell, you DO know the original story behind a "bug" in your computer system, right?
Wow. Now I wonder if that whole Air Canada thing wasn't some story cooked up because a mouse got into the baggage hold (or something).
Heads will roll!!
Posted by: margi at August 20, 2003 8:31 PMFound this blog through jargonese, and I only have two things to say:
1. Gotta love how the "new" world order is continually befuddled by things that are so decidedly old school.....
2. So Sting was wrong, there wasn't a ghost in the machine, then? It's a freakin' MOUSE? That changes things.
Thank you, don't forget to tip your server, and try the veal! The ten o'clock show is even better, so be sure to come back........
Posted by: PJ at August 20, 2003 9:17 PMHope you survive the layoffs!
Posted by: bogie at August 21, 2003 7:22 AM