There was a minor service outage on Thursday morning. Our server was functioning just fine, but they were doing some maintenance work in the data center which kept anyone from contacting the server. This outage lasted about 45 minutes.
This morning, there was another service outage. In this case, it was our server. I'd have warned everybody if I'd known it was going to take so long. However, what should have taken about five minutes ended up taking almost five hours. Anyone who's fixed something, I'm sure you know the drill. You go to fix the snap, and realize the zipper isn't sliding very well, and then you realize the cloth part of the zipper is about ready to tear, and then the sewing machine doesn't want to feed the thread onto the bobbin, and then you realize that the sewing machine cord is frayed.
You have to do all this preventative maintenance; after all, for lack of a nail, the shoe was lost, and in the end, the kingdom. I just wish I had known ahead of time. Blondie is unhappy with me; I'd told her I would be back in 20 minutes, and hours later, I had to tell it it would still be hours before I returned to bed.
Just to make sure that everything was fixed, the last 90 minutes were spent doing automated testing, to ensure that the server was working OK. Luckily, it was. It's Saturday morning, before dawn, which is one of the quietest times of the week, but there are a lot of people working on their sites later Saturday morning, and I didn't want to interrupt that. And besides, I'm about ready to catch some shuteye.
Not much chance I'll get 90 minutes in a row, of course. Of late, there seem to be people knocking on the door, or telephoning every 10 minutes, trying to sell me something. I really love it when I pick up the phone and get a recorded message telling me that all operators are busy, and to please hold. Yeah, right, like I have nothing better to do, than to wait on hold for someone who wants to "give" me a free blood glucose meter, that only works with the test strips they sell. Twenty years ago, the curse of diabetes was that people lost their legs, and went blind. These days, the curse of diabetes is a phone that never stops ringing. Not much improvement....