In 1987 my wife and I lived in Hartford, Connecticut, next door neighbors to Mark Twain to be exact. Well, not actually Mark, but his New England home was just east of us on Farmington Avenue. We had a garden apartment in the Clemens Place which was an easy bus ride into downtown Hartford. I worked as a software consultant at Travelers Insurance and Carrie worked at the West Farmington mall. She was still suffering the pangs of retail management back in those days.
I liked my job at Traveler’s. The work was good, the team was great and living in New England was exciting for a young couple in their 20’s. I sharpened my skills as a COBOL programmer and tackled every project with vigor. Fridays I would go out with some of the guys from work and have a few beers at a local pub.
One day, I remember it was a Friday, I was in a series of morning meetings. We were discussing the upcoming deployment. We had made large enhancements to a billing system in the insurance company. By lunchtime, everyone was onboard with the logistics of the deployment. Several batch jobs were going to run to make the enhancements in production. Everyone was onboard, that is except, the project manager who was on vacation that week. He should have been there, he admitted that, but there was a family issue that unexpectedly took him out of town. There were some project constraints with other systems that left us keeping the scheduled deployment. In the afternoon after the first two batch jobs had run, we received a phone call from the project manager. He was furious! There was communication breakdown somewhere within the team and his recommendations to delay the deployment were lost in the mix. “We simply cannot deploy this week” His voice was loud and frustrated. “You have to back out the batch jobs you have already run” I discovered that this was bad news for the team. There was an emergency meeting to figure out how to sort this all out.
In the meeting we learned that the repair was going to be a very difficult and complicated process, taking nearly 24 hours to complete. And it had to be done before Monday morning. Disaster!
Traveler’s had its own data center in those days and was supported by a 24-hour crew of well-trained operator specialists. We would be given top-notch support to unravel things. The dilemma though was that someone was needed to monitor the work for the duration. We needed someone to spend another 24 hours at work. Me.
I sat at my desk watching all the happy employees leaving work on a Friday afternoon knowing that I will still be here tomorrow. It was unsettling. Soon the office floor was barren and quiet. I had an operator from the data center on my phone. We were starting the first job and it needed tapes that he was mounting. “How many jobs in all do we need to run?” I asked out of curiosity. “148 jobs need to run in a specific order.” So there it was. The countdown had begun.
I was on and off the line to the data center about every twenty minutes, just tracking where we were at and what was coming. Babysitting, that’s what it was. I strolled over to the window. We were on the 14th floor and I had a spectacular view of the sun setting. I decided to call my wife. Then I ducked out of the building to get a sandwich on the street.
Soon it was dark and the only lights on our floor were the emergency lights and my desk. We were down to 122 jobs left to go. Everything was working like clockwork. But I was bored. By 10:30pm I couldn’t take much more of the restlessness and that’s when I remembered that fourteen hours earlier I showed up at work for an eight hour workday. I had rode into the city on my bicycle and it was in the basement parked and locked in the bike section. I think it was bored too.
The configuration of my floor and most floors in the Traveler’s high-rise building was symmetrical. The elevator lobby was in the center of the floor with a walkway going all the way around, desks on the outside lap to the windows. Lap. You know it kind of was a lap, a bike lap. Yea, that’s what I will do. It will keep me awake. I’m just getting exercise, that’s all.
I checked in with the data center. 98 jobs to go. The one that was running was a long one. I had time. I took the elevator down to the parking garage and unlocked my bike. I entered the elevator with bike in hand and pressed the “14” button. The door closed. When I arrived on my floor, I walked the bike out to the walkway and mounted it. My first lap was slow and a little shaky. But in time I was rolling along at a pretty good clip. Heck I could put some speed on now. Nothing was in my way with the exception of a few office plants, but I managed my way around them easily. Then I had an obstacle. A big one…
Moving out of the elevator lobby at slow, steady speed, was a large janitorial work cart, packed full of essential tools for the job. The cleaning lady was here. I was heading straight for her on bike at top speed. The cart appeared first then she stepped into the room. When the Polish lady saw me she screamed. I slammed on the brakes but I still hit her rolling cart on the one side. I careened away and into an office plant before I laid the bike down, rolling away from it.
She was terrified. I rose up quickly and checked myself for any injuries. I was lucky, I was okay. I approached the cleaning lady who looked uninjured. Her fear started shifting to anger. I’m pretty sure I had never been cussed out in Polish before, but now I stood before her getting a serious tongue lashing. She seemed to be fine. I apologized in slow English hoping she was understanding some of it. She pulled her cart back to her and shoved off in the opposite direction returning to her work. My bike was fine. I decided to park it deskside and check in on the data center. 96 jobs to go. I decided to stay at my desk until the whole floor was cleaned.
By 3 am we had 45 jobs to go and were making steady progress. At 3:45 I awoke at my desk with a phone in my ear. The night shift operator was yelling from the other end. “Wake up, Wake up!” Gees, I had fallen asleep mid-conversation. We just finished another job, 33 to go.
At 5 am, Saturday morning, I was doing pushups alongside of my bike. The cleaning lady had been long gone by now. I wandered over to the kitchenette area, looking for a cup of coffee and a candy bar. I scored on both counts. At 7 am we had 17 jobs left. I decided to call my wife and see how her night went. She was already awake and about ready to call me. We talked for a while, but then my second line was ringing. The data center. I hung up with my wife and took the other call. A missing tape was delaying our progress. Turns out there was a small bug in the batch job’s code. I made a code change and redeployed the code to production. The job was restarted and we were off and running again. Boy was I getting tired. I got another cup of coffee.
By 1 pm we were down to 8 jobs left. By 3:30 pm we were running the last job. I was ecstatic but very tired. At 4 pm, I could see on my monitor that the last job had finished. Just then the data center phoned me, congratulating me on helping out. I phoned my boss and then my wife. I started shutting down my computer and turning off my lights. I pushed my chair in and turned to leave with my backpack and bike. I rolled out into the elevator corridor and pressed the “down” button. While I waited I started to chuckle to myself, thinking about the poor cleaning lady last night. When the door opened, there she stood staring at me, and I at her. After a very uncomfortable moment, without saying a word, she reached out and closed the door leaving me and my bike where I stood.
I could take the next elevator.
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What we do to pass the time. Glad you did not get hurt.
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