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pseydtonneToday is a holiday in Massachusetts: Patriot's Day Observed. Patriot's Day (15 April) is the date of the Battle of Lexington, when someone fired The Shot Heard Round The World. Housing prices in Lexington have never been the same. I think I'm sitting in one of the few offices in Lexington that isn't closed today. Since one of the largest IRS processing centers is in North Andover, many Americans got not one but two extra days to file taxes this year.
My office is flanked by two parking lots. One of them is a lake right now thanks to the 36-hour rain festival. Normally the parking lots would be full but we're lucky to have the holiday. A lot of parents worked from home today to skip paying for day care on a non-school day.
I'm sitting in the high point of a swamp, taking calls from people who've screwed up impressively. I'm seeing the kind of data corruption I usually associate with heavy problems. None of these people seem very worried, which scares me even more. I would think the potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in data would equal sheer panic. Maybe they all have great backup strategies. If so, why are they calling me?
They call because sometimes it's faster for me to offer a fix. Sometimes it's just that official word from the outside that "yeah, you're hosed" is what it takes to get an emergency plan activated.
I have become a triage expert. I can tell very quickly whether a plan has too many holes, whether the redundancies are useful ones, whether a problem can be fixed. I want to say "oh, it's years of analysis and observation..." and then explain how I pull apart problems. Sometimes it really is just magic: I can feel the vibe of a problem, tell whether it's quiet before the storm or storm before the quiet. I'm the data whisperer.
Meow. I still wanna go home, end the day here and start the evening in front of a bowl of chili.
-rester dans son coin, Dante
My office is flanked by two parking lots. One of them is a lake right now thanks to the 36-hour rain festival. Normally the parking lots would be full but we're lucky to have the holiday. A lot of parents worked from home today to skip paying for day care on a non-school day.
I'm sitting in the high point of a swamp, taking calls from people who've screwed up impressively. I'm seeing the kind of data corruption I usually associate with heavy problems. None of these people seem very worried, which scares me even more. I would think the potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in data would equal sheer panic. Maybe they all have great backup strategies. If so, why are they calling me?
They call because sometimes it's faster for me to offer a fix. Sometimes it's just that official word from the outside that "yeah, you're hosed" is what it takes to get an emergency plan activated.
I have become a triage expert. I can tell very quickly whether a plan has too many holes, whether the redundancies are useful ones, whether a problem can be fixed. I want to say "oh, it's years of analysis and observation..." and then explain how I pull apart problems. Sometimes it really is just magic: I can feel the vibe of a problem, tell whether it's quiet before the storm or storm before the quiet. I'm the data whisperer.
Meow. I still wanna go home, end the day here and start the evening in front of a bowl of chili.
-rester dans son coin, Dante
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