Last Sunday I had to work, for an electoral application serving real time for a local election; precisely the condition was that customers could call me if they had problems, but the only one that had real problems was myself... . After a big Saturday night, I went to bed at about 3:00 a.m. I was awaken by a silly SMS, at 7.30 in the morning!! A customer wrote that I had to call him to explain some functionality of the product that I had to maintain; I thought that it was a bad joke, maybe of my boss, so I went back to bed, but after 4 minutes he phoned me, and believe me when I say that he didn't know what he was talking about... After 12.00 the customer called me again to signal a single character mistake in the main page of application. 'Okay, no problem, my fault I’ll fix it immediately!' was my answer. After 1 hour CEO sent me an SMS asking me how things were going, and I was proud to tell that I had everything under control. Big Boss phoned me after the CEO’s SMS to ask me the same thing, and I was VERY proud to tell him the same thing. 16.30 Hell on Earth: the customer calls me to signal that the table in the first page of application (yes you got it right, the same page of the wrong little letter!!) was completely, definitely, drastically, dramatically wrong!! OH Geez!! I phoned Big Boss immediately to communicate the situation. The first thing that Big Boss asked me was:" What kind of monitor do you have at home, the one you just got?" after 1 sec of embarrassment I answered "Samsung 2232sw 22''", Big Boss replied: "AHAHAHA I'm in front of a wonderful 245Bw 24 better than yours!! HAHAHA", and hanged up, without giving me any kind of help. At that point I thought : "Please, reboot the universe...". I've tried to download locally the db on the company's laptop, but after some seconds I discovered that someone had changed password in the database settings (I later discovered that it was Boss)... My last chance was to go in the office, phone to Polyglot (another a-bit-off founder of the company) to tell him that a global catastrophe was happening, but he told me:" Don't be afraid, it's regular with that customer! We'll meet in the office later, keep cool! Bye!" Geez, keep cool? I didn't have enough valium. In the meantime my girlfriend had arrived ( yes I've succeeded to bring her back, until then...) but I had to go so I told her an impressive statement: "My dear, I've got to go, its my duty! See you soon!" (I've tried to call her since… no success). I got the car but found a terrible jam on the street. The customer wanted the application fixed by 19:00, and he told me that at 16:30, when he called me again it was 17:50 and I was blocked on the street, so I told them:" No problem my colleagues are working on the problem now! When I arrived in the office it was 18.30 and I was alone, after some minutes Polyglot arrived. I started my Pc, and realized that the network was down!!! Damn!!! The cleaning woman!!! She unplugged something!! I succeeded to put my pc back online with an air cable... It was 18.50 and customer called again, I told them: "Sure, about 20 minutes..." We started to work on the application, after 30 mins nothing was fixed. Finally at 19.45 it was fixed and deployed!!! Whoa!! The customer kept calling, giving me false alerts, just out of fear. I realized that the only thing to do was to wait till client calms down. So I put a Divx "Bourne Supremacy" because I didn't have "Mission impossible", much more appropriate.
At about 9 p.m. Boss called me: "Everything is going fine, ain't it Gino? Just as I told you!". I tried to tell Boss, what had happened, but he had already hanged up, with "Now go home, don't waste our extra-time pay just for sleeping there".
At about 9 p.m. Boss called me: "Everything is going fine, ain't it Gino? Just as I told you!". I tried to tell Boss, what had happened, but he had already hanged up, with "Now go home, don't waste our extra-time pay just for sleeping there".
