STALE ELECTRONS

Our 'True-Life Anecdote'...
When this company was a few months up and running I was working tech support on a weekend afternoon during a particularly nasty snow storm. The storm had been on for about day and there was a foot of snow or more from Kentucky North and East. A lot of snow.

Our company was new and we were especially sensitive to bad press and poor appearance. Every mistake or bobble felt like it could be our last, as well as our first. While none of us were actually inexperienced, some things involved with our new venture were totally outside any of our real-world experiences or our book-smarts. We were just settling into our first market and hadn't yet wore it in like a comfy shoe.

So we get a call from a bemused (not angry, just concerned) customer telling us that our link to the rest of the internet seemed to be down. This came as a suprise to me since I was actually downloading new software from a remote site. I pointed this out to the customer who then admitted that all they had tried were their old web-pages on two of our competitors in town. He had (quite reasonably) assumed that we were down since the likely-hood of both their sites being down at the same time was so low. At this point, I hear another tech, in the background, explaining to another customer that we don't block mail from our competitors and that no matter what they said we were like we weren't doing anything of the sort. This is called a clue!

We then run some simple diagnostics and discover that the packets get all the way to our national link in Chicago and then just stop. For both our competitors, and no one else! Just like they are being blocked. Being the fearless and intrepid trouble shooters that we were, we naturally panicked and called the head of technical services. We had him call our competitors and ask why they were blocking us and telling their customers that it was us. They said, "What? That's what you are doing!"

At this point we decide that it must be someone elses fault. Always a bitter-sweet moment since you are off the hook morally but still have to figure out what the problem is. So we call the third party in, our mutual backbone provider. After a short wait to get someone on the phone, it is the weekend remember, we finally get a tech at their service to check the connections. He reports back that he can get to both of us, so what's the problem? We explain that we can't get to them and they can't get to us but that both of us can get to the outside world. So he looks up the connections to see if there is an internal break between two of their machines. He reports back that we are plugged into the same machine and thus there is no interconnect. Oh yeah, and the machine checks out 100%.

With our pet, it ain't us, we swear! theory shot down, we retreat to lick our geek wounds and try and brainstorm a new angle of attack. We quickly come up with a new theory, sure the machine is fine but is the machine programmed correctly? We wait on hold till we get the same tech back then present our new glimmer of wisdom. The guys checks, no updates for a day or two to that machine, but he'd be glad to get in and check the exact addresses we are concerned about. Fine. All Fine. No problems. Grrrr.

So we ask him if he can get from our side of the link to theirs while he is in the machine. Boom! No he can't! Suddenly we are totally off the hook. So we ask him, "when can you get it fixed?"

Long pause here...

"Uh, I already did what I'm supposed to do to fix it..."

Ugly short pause while my boss and I stare at each other in fear...

"Get your boss, please," is all my boss says. We procede to cover all the same ground in a compressed, "Yeah, we checked that already," fashion. After their higher up tries a couple of times to update the machine with the proper configuration he deliberately mis-sets it in order to verify that it is really accepting the changes. It was. Keep in mind at this point that they are now very worried because this machine connects literally hundreds of companies to the Internet. Also, remember that they are almost trapped in their office by the snow and are suffering all kinds of line outages and extra phone calls to support. Because everyone is trying to fool around on the web, it's snowing outside!

Now we are all in a bind, having sorta run out of ideas. So we ask is there is anyone higher up on the technical food chain that they can call in to look at the machine. They freak out. Snowstorm, weekend, pride, scared, etc. So we freak out right back at them. Snowstorm, weekend, customers, scared, etc. We convince them that the customer is always right and we are the customer so... They waffle a little and only page the guy. We ask if they think this guy can fix it. They laugh. They seem to feel that this guy could redesign the whole Internet system over a long holiday weekend. We are hopeful again. It's been hours, by the way.

After a short wait we are conferenced in with the big cahoona and he runs down the entire checklist of what we thought to try over hours in just a few minutes. He wants desparately not to have to drive into town in the middle of the worst storm in years, on the weekend. So he thinks for a minute, and then sends the tech into the actual room with the machine. and has him report back on the status lights on it. All green. So he tells the tech to go back and press this one specific button down for three seconds and then let go, notice the lights and report back.

Bing! We all notice it suddenly start working! The tech comes back, and reports all green again. We announce that it works again. The tech and my boss then both ask the big cahoona what that magic button did.

"Oh, That's the reset button. Sometimes you just gotta reset these things, you know."

So whenever you have to reboot your computer because it is acting weird, don't feel too badly about it. Mega-million dollar companies do it on the biggest machines they've got. It's a rough business.