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emergency tour
Tuesday, September 5 2017
I realized today that an important backup script hadn't run since late July on The Organization's most important server, and it was all because I'd named a script with an underscore where a dash should've been. This same script updated a reporting database that also hasn't been updated since late July, although for some reason Allison (who uses it) never noticed. Since nothing bad had happened during this time, I'd probably dodged a bullet, but I still needed to get that script working. I tried running it in the middle of the day, but it soon crapped-out the server and I had to restart mysqld. What a mess!
Later I conducted an interview for the position of IT Specialist with a nice woman who works for the army protecting America from weapons of mass destruction. I really wanted to hire her, but it turned out that she had weak Linux skills, and Linux would be the primary environment she would be working on. I brought this up with my colleague Dan, and he said he thought it was a deal breaker. Bummer!
Meanwhile, Nicole is so frazzled that she wants our IT Department to have a director so she doesn't have to be the de-facto director. That's fair enough, and I floated the idea that the director be Allison. I thought I should clear it with Dan, but when I brought it up with him, he regurgitated a talking point I'd had about Allison over a month ago: that she speaks too much in jargon and that this tends to confuse people. But I don't know what the alternative is; Dan tends to take things too personally and the job would quickly wreck him, a fault he readily acknowledges.
At 7:18pm, Gretchen reported that her fever was 101.9 and that she should probably go to Emergency One, the non-hospital emergency center on Hurley Avenue near Uptown in Kingston. So I drove her there and she eventually saw a doctor, though he said he wasn't equipped to deal with her problem and that she should go to a real emergency room.
There are two hospitals in the area: the one in Kingston, and Northern Dutchess just north of Rhinebeck across the Hudson. The former is understaffed and attracts a lot of marginal characters from the Broadway area, whereas Northern Dutchess is situated in the middle of Rockefeller Republican country. So that was where we went. There was only one guy in the waiting area when we arrived, and we only had to watch about ten minutes of America's Got Talent on the waiting room teevee before Gretchen was called in.
While Gretchen got 24 samples of blood drawn, I surfed the web and Slack on my phone, occasionally looking up to watch bits of teevee programming or the people who came in. There was a man there with a strange wolfish face and lots of tattoos, and I was surprised how conventionally-attractive his girlfriend was. She was the one who was sick.
Gretchen called me at some point to say results would take an hour to come back, and she suggested I drive out to the Hannaford in Redhook for necessities. And do I did. Gretchen wanted canned and frozen peaches, orange juice, and angelhair pasta. I wanted things like bread, antacids, bloody mary mix, and bacon-flavored tempeh. The Redhook Hannaford is nicer than any of the Hannafords we have on the Midwest side of the Hudson, and it was nearly empty as I shopped (by the time I checked out using a self-checkout robot, it was after 11:00pm).
Gretchen was waiting for me in front of the emergency room entrance when I returned from Hannaford. She was feeling better, though she still didn't know what was wrong with her. All the tests with results that came back today were negative, though other test results will be coming back in future days.
Back at the house, I finally got a chance to run that backup script that hadn't been run since late July. I watched it in detail as it ran and noticed that the restore to the reporting database took hours to complete; it still wasn't done when I checked it at 8:00am the next day. Clearly I needed to make some changes. That's the problem with scripts that break and don't run for a month on a growing database. It's possible that they outgrow the capabilities of such scripts.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170905 feedback
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