Today was my last day for a nice long vacation. The plan was to go in, wrap things up, and say goodbye to everyone. Of course as soon as I entered the building, everybody came running to me to try to talk about the emergencies going on.Apparently our customer's configuration management team had delivered the wrong version of the application to the users. And all holy hell was breaking loose. I had to tell my whole team to leave me alone while I determined what had happened. As soon as I identified the problem being with customer CM, not our company, the project manager breathed a sigh of relief.
Many trouble tickets that got opened today were flase positives. They were due to the fact that a really old version of the application got installed everywhere. The good part about this was that they were easy tickets to close out once users got the correct version of the application. There is a saying that goes "when it rains, it pours". Well it decided to pour down hard today. My phone stopped working right in the middle of a conference call. It ceased to function for the whole day. So I had to call into my voice mail from different phones to catch all the messages people were leaving me. Nice.
The real kicker happened late in the afternoon. But some unusual bad luck, a high priority trouble ticket had come in. But the ticket did not show up in our inbox. The customer started complaining that nobody was working this high priority ticket. By this time the Help Desk had gone home. I was going to sneak out the back door, but I warned the closest manager that once again things were going to get rocky. He talked me into doing a quick initial investigation, and providing the team with some information to help them get through this tough ticket. I tried calling the user but he had left for the day. So I went back and reviewed how I handled the last trouble ticket similar to this high priority one. And I tried to explain in English what the normal operation of the software was, what the perceived problem was, and how some actions by the user could make the software appear faulty.
My deep hope is that my vacation does not get cut short or cancelled due to this latest high priority problem. My fingers are crossed.
