We've shut down our member's area and ticket system for an upgrade. Right at the peak traffic time for the business, of course.
Genius, man. Pure genius.
Man's greatest asset is the opposable thumbs. Makes them so much easier to twiddle, you know.
But here? Yeah, just knock the heart of the business down during the day, whatever... hey, check out this cool site... (whistle)
Customers see the "Back in a moment" message. Some just shrug and wait patiently.
Some. More are getting pissed, calling. Getting the same response, because internally we can't get to it either.
Then they hit the chat system. Same thing.
Infuriated, they turn to writing their requests in emails.
I'm responding "I can't enter a ticket for you." Not taking any of their bait to fight. Not worth it.
Nor does this workstation talk to a printer, so I can't even walk the request to a datacenter technician.
And if you send them something through the internal chat system, it's not just like talking to a brick wall, but talking to a retarded brick wall.
I hope the system comes back up soon.
What puts this all into perspective was a big speech a week or so ago about taking ownership of issues, solving them, working through management to make it possible for us to work smarter and more effectively.
I'd start with running upgrades of mission-critical systems at night or the weekends.
When the glorious day of turning in a two week's notice comes, I figure I'll staple a list of other helpful suggestions to it.
When I did major mission-critical upgrades back at That Place, I did my best to perform them at night. Or on a holiday like New Years Day when local news was absent or skeleton-crew.
If they had to be done during the day, then I'd do them the moment a Noon newscast was archived and I'd have the maximum amount of time to get it done quickly and then give everybody the maximum amount of time to prepare the next newscast.
Because as critical as the upgrades were, minimizing impact for the business and the customers was even more critical in a 24/7 operation.
When the teleprompter was unreliable, I had them test it a few minutes before the newscast. It would give me enough time to make sure I could reset it and get it working again if both units failed. (Not that this stopped geniuses like Hurricane Brunson from waiting until the show started and then pitching a psycho-fit... what an amazing demonstration of the Peter Principle)
Of course, with the arrival of Tweedledum Jim, mission-critical systems were knocked out and "tested" during newscasts. Wire ingestors, dishes, receive sites, the phone system - yeah, nobody's going to need those things.
I figured Tweedledumber didn't tear down any robotic pedestals during newscasts because the camera operator would have mowed them down with the remaining robots.