Oh what a night

Yeesh, I finally manage to get an early night and what happens, I get called.

Ok so I am actually on call this week but that's so not the point. Worst of it is that there was nothing I could physically do about the problem.

*GEEK ALERT!* I.T. type technical stuff about to be spewed…

There was a connectivity issue between the mainframe and the tape drives that meant the pre-batch backup stopped halfway through. Senior management were called and refused to allow the jobs to go ahead without the backup so we had to wait for an engineer to fix the problem or try and do the backups another way.

My Night:
Call from Ops at 11:45pm to tell me about the problem. Me: great, thanks. Go back to sleep
Call from my boss at 12:45am asking me if there's anything we can do - Me: Not unless you’re willing to let the batch go ahead without backups. Go back to sleep again
Call from my boss again at 2:40am telling me that one of the other poor call out souls would be contacting me for instructions in order to attempt a backup to another disk instead of the tapes.
Call from the other poor sod (A) who's been dragged out of bed at 2:50am asking me for instructions.
At this point I'm sitting up in bed with the light on, kinda dozing and half-heartedly petting the cats who are quite used to these occasional nocturnal wanderings and are fully prepared to make the most of extra petting time.
Call from A at 4:10am asking me how long the backups should take
Call from A at 4:30am telling me it's all sorted.
Call from me to Ops at 4:40 with instructions on how to get the batch going again

So at 4:50am, after having been awake since 2:40 just to direct other people, I finally managed to put my head back down on the pillow. Of course it was about another half hour before I got back to sleep, but at least I didn't have to get up at 6:30am this time. One of the few things about being on call is that if you have been up between midnight and your normal start time you can come in late by the amount of time you were up for, as well as getting the overtime pay for it.

So last night has paid for my latest stash building exercise. Actually, when I think of it in those terms it doesn't seem so bad any more =)