The longest day of the year

In my part of the Empire, the longest day of the year is not Midsummer.  The longest day of the year is the day after Labor Day, when millions of students return to school and millions of employees return from summer vacation, and they all discover their computers Don’t Work.  Matters are made worse because everyone who had a problem on Friday and put it off, thinking “It’s almost the holiday; screw it, I’ll call it in on Tuesday” followed through and called.

We know this is coming.  Last Thursday an email went around, offering the techs as much as an hour of overtime before their shifts officially begin, another hour after it officially ends, and another half-hour with a company-provided lunch if you agree to take a thirty-minute lunch hour.  I’m feeling pretty desperate for cash now, so even though I had also signed up to work Monday for holiday pay, I was one of the ones who agreed to take on the Tuesday OT.

It was needed, and in spades.  Several of our tools, including the logging and dispatching tool and the knowledge base, apparently had code pushes over the weekend and were flakier than a bowl of Post Toasties, with long, long response time lags and intermittent outages.  Dispatching problems often turned a simple ten-minute bad hard drive call into a half-hour slugfest.  I had to do four reboots between six-thirty, when I went on the phones (half an hour before my usual start time) and eight-thirty.  A complete cold shutdown finally fixed the dispatcher, but the knowledge base tool never did work right all day, leaving all of us in the 1985 help desk situation of “you can troubleshoot only as much as you yourself know.”

The calls never let up.  Call-waiting volumes stayed between 25 and 60 all day, and didn’t drop off until four, when the East Coast at last went home.  Not that it helped me any, because just before four I got stuck on a horrible malware call with a guy who’d picked up a browser hijacker that was redirecting him to porn sites.  To try to fix it, I ended up remote-controlling into his system (think pcAnywhere) on a 56K dialup connection to try to dig the mess out.

Working remote control on a 56K connection is horribly, painfully slow.  Every move I made was herky-jerky as I’d click and then wait for the screen redraw to come back across the soda-straw connection.  I dug in his temp directories, rummaged in his system files, dug through his Registry, and still never got the damnable thing killed.  In the end, and after more than two hours of work, I had to recommend that he download a spyware remover and told him if that didn’t work, he was in for a format reinstall.  Which was a very depressing thing to have to tell him, but the hijacker, like so much porn malware, got its hooks so deeply into the system that I couldn’t find where it was re-spawning itself from each time he restarted the computer.  At that point, a format reinstall is the only guaranteed cure.

By the time I got off the phone with him, it was six-thirty and I’d been at my desk for twelve hours straight with one shortened lunch break.  I was banging hard up against the deadly “Thou shalt never work more than” limit of twelve hours in a day.  (Twelve hours is the point at which I would go into double time instead of time and a half.)  My timesheet had nineteen and three-quarters hours on it at the end of today, and I’ve only worked two days this week.

I have no idea what the call volume and service level will look like in the morning, but I’m betting the one’s gonna be enormous and the other’s gonna be low.  I’m only glad that no calls for early or late overtime tomorrow have gone out already.  If it comes, I think I might just be able to manage a short lunch, but that’s it.  And I might not even do that.

Miss Marple pitches Agent Orange and an avenging button.  Fnord.