03/12/2025 - Weekend Wednesday
Today's Rating: 7/10
Song of the Day: Mountains - Hans Zimmer
Current Book: Revenge of the Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Last day of the working week for me! Due to the long weekend of support and some residual paid leave award that I had, I had planned on taking off most of Thursday and all of Friday. However, due to Tuesday's discovery that I had maintenance work Wednesday evening, I had enough hour overage to fully take off Thursday as well.
After waking up, I got my coffee and checked in at work. As evident by yesterday's post, I had a few critical things I needed to deal with early in the morning which is why yesterday's post was so short. One of the sites my team supports had a brief outage (20 minutes) late the night before, so we needed to do a further investigation into it. I probably should have just written the blog after, but I am such a creature of habit. After wrapping that up, I had to get prepped up for the maintenance I would be conducting that evening. I had never done this particular maintenance before (only shadowed), and it was one of the more involved ones. We have some decent documentation around it though, so I was not too worried about it.
After getting what I felt was sufficiently prepped, I tested the patching/upgrade in a "lower" environment (which at this point is not really lower since so many people use it internally). That went well which gave me the confidence for the evening's maintenance. The rest of the day was spent on service tickets. In particular, there was one service ticket that has become the bane of my existence over the last week.
Some tickets are hard technically (i.e. the actual tech challenge behind it is hard/the solution is complex). This ticket was not like that. Not at all. The best way I can describe it would be trying to explain something to someone, but they were restricted in that they could only read every third word you wrote. Honestly, I'm not sure if the person who submitted the ticket even read past the first sentence. After finding the issue and writing a detailed but concise of what he needed to do to fix it, I replied on the ticket thinking that would be the end of it. However, an hour later he proceeded to reply in line with my favorite philosophy: "whataboutism".
Me: "Here's the issue. A link to why it doesn't work here. Where you need to make the change here: Once that's implemented, your issue will be resolved"
Them: "Yea, well what about here where it does work?"
Me: "Yes, that's because it is correct there because x exists and y was setup correctly"
Them: "Well, I don't understand why it works for x but not for y even though they are setup the same way"
Me: "They are not setup the same way as evidenced here:"
At this point, I decided maybe explaining was not enough, and he needed me to give him an example to work from. I made the change that needed to be made to fix the issue and submitted a pull request to his repo. I responded on the ticket with the example and explained why it worked. His response:
Them: "Oh, it seems to be working now. I'm not sure why it was so delayed though . Do you have an explanation for that?"
At this point, I was convinced I was either:
- Talking to bad AI
- Being pranked
I replied once again with specifics on how it was the example I had provided him that resolved the issue and not any sort of delay.
After work, I had plans to play mixed doubles with Jerry, Rebecca, and Mary. I don't play a ton of mixed doubles and had never met Rebecca and Mary before. They were both nice, and we had a good match before I had to leave at 6:45 to be home for the maintenance that would start at 7.
I got home right on time to start the maintenance. Overall, it went well. I did run into a hiccup with a portion of it failing, but rerunning it a couple of times did the trick. I also fixed a lingering issue that caused excessive restarts during the maintenance which should help reduce how long it takes in the future. I logged off work around 9 PM and head to bed to read until Maddie got home.
I read another chapter or so of my book before Maddie got home. We head to bed around 10.
Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!