Time To Get Weird
This one goes back to 1999 or so. I was working in the corporate headquarters of a very large company. We were responsible for the email system for HQ—about 1,100 users at the time. Like all the systems admins at HQ, I was a contractor. My boss was a guy I’ll call Sam. Sam was the site manager.
The customer contact was a guy I’ll call Jay. Jay was what they called an IT planner—basically a systems architect. He had dotted-line responsibility over all the systems admins, including me.
I also had a backup there, who I’ll call Ben. Ben was a competent systems admin, capable of handling most day-to-day stuff.
We normally kept staff in the office from 8-6 on workdays, with an on-call rotation for certain specialty areas, including email. Back then, we carried a pager (yes, an old school beeper) for on-call duty. My on-call rotation was one week on, one week off. This story happened in my “off” week, when Ben carried the pager.
One Saturday night, at around 3:30 am, my home phone rang. My wife answered, and it was Jay calling. She grumpily handed the phone to me. Now, my wife and I had just gotten home, having been out for much of the night with our neighbors.
I was, for lack of a more refined term, positively hammered at this point. The news I got was utterly disturbing. Jay informed me that there was an email outage, and that I needed to remote in and get it back up immediately, and then drive to the office to start a root cause analysis.
I informed him that I was in no condition to drive (let alone touch a production rig) and asked what Ben told him when he called the on-call pager. Jay told me that he didn’t call the on-call pager because this was way too serious of a problem to trust the backup systems admin. He wanted me working on this, and said that if I can’t be relied upon to do my job when I was needed, he’d find someone else who could.
Then he hung up the phone. I went back to sleep. The next morning, I had an email from Ben telling me that Jay had called him at home rather than paging the on-call rotation. It was a very simple issue—our backup software went screwy and started writing out hundreds of temp files, which filled up a critical volume on our production email server.
Temp files deleted, email services restarted, problem solved. Total downtime after Ben got the call was about 15 minutes. The next day, I arrived at the office to a note from Sam, my manager, asking me to come see him ASAP. I went to his office, and sitting there was Jay, who was in the process of demanding that I be fired immediately for “drinking at work”.
From there, the conversation went something like this:
Sam: But he wasn’t at work. He was at home and wasn’t in the on-call rotation this weekend.
Jay: I don’t want to hear it about the on-call rotation. He needs to be ready to work when I tell him to. I can’t rely on an alcoholic, and I want him gone.
Sam: If he’s not on call, he’s free to do whatever he wants with his time.
Jay: Not as long as he works for me.
Jay then demands that I hand my office badge to him, and calls security from Sam’s phone to have me escorted out of the building. I’m in absolute disbelief at this point. Sam gets up and goes off to points unknown, just as security arrives to see me out to the parking lot. As I’m driving off, I see Jay’s boss, I’ll call her Mary. Mary is running across the street to the parking lot.
Strange, but I was more focused on how the heck I was going to explain this to my wife when I got home.
I got home, and my wife was sitting on the couch, just absolutely livid. Now this was getting REALLY weird. I hadn’t told her what happened yet. “Those jerks fired you”!? I’m confused as heck at this point. My wife told me that Mary called her, and that I need to call her back as soon as possible. Come to find out, when Sam had went off, he was going to Mary’s office to explain the situation and keep Jay from firing me.
Mary freaked the heck out. When I saw her running across the street, she was trying to catch me in the parking lot before I left to tell me to come back in. When Mary couldn’t find my car, she went back into the office and called the house, intending to leave me a voicemail, but got my wife instead. Mary told my wife what had happened, promised to rein Jay in, and asked her to tell me to come back into the office to sort it out.
So I let them stew for a while. Mary called about 20 minutes after I got home. We let her go to the machine. Sam called as well, just as my wife and I went out to get some lunch. Over lunch, my wife and I talked about how we would handle this, and (largely for financial reasons) we decided to talk to them to see if we could work this out.
We got back home to three more voicemails from Mary and Sam. About 30 seconds after we walked in the door, the phone rang again. This time it was Jay, obviously on speakerphone. Jay apologized to me and asked me to come back to work the next day. I agreed, but as he hung up, I could hear Mary say to him: “J, you’re a complete idiot”.