A few other things have been going on while I’ve been writing that Silent Hill feature, but for once I didn’t want my next post prediction to be wrong. Also, that thing was ridiculously long.

We had to let yet another person go at Swerdlin. This means Travis and I (and our coworker Eric) have now taken over the IT department from the inside. It’s our show now. This is much better, honestly. There will be no more random unplugging of the phone system…you know, rather than list everything here in public, let’s just say no more random crap in general.

Which doesn’t mean there won’t be our fair share of work insanity, it’s just going to be much more awesome and less “Whyyyyyyyyy.” For instance, this week we rack mounted our last two servers that we didn’t have rails for (long story). One of them was our main Oracle server that can’t be taken offline without, essentially, shutting down the company. Complicating the issue was the fact that this particular server had been mounted on UPS rails previously. The common joke describing the difference between doctors and mechanics is that mechanics don’t have to work on a car while it’s running. In that case, IT must be somewhere at the halfway point between the two, because we successfully moved this thing in the middle of the day, during production, without unplugging it from the wall or the network. The process involved slowly lifting it up and perching it on reams of paper, one at a time; the reams of paper would be placed on the top of the server below it. The old rails were then removed and the new ones screwed in. It looked something like this:

This is why paperless offices will never work.

The overall atmosphere at work has already improved greatly. I apologize to anyone I’ve not spoken to as much out there in the interwebs during the transition, though. Lately the last thing I’ve wanted to do when I got home was sit in front of a computer.

I have one last funny story to tell, but that’ll wait for yet another post…