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A Word to the Wise
There is a well known old saying which goes something like this, “Knowledge is gained by your own efforts. Wisdom is gained by learning from the actions of others.” After being in the computer business for over 25 years, boy oh boy have I gained a lot of “Knowledge”! I have had many sleepless nights and frustrating days due to unexpected events or “not so clearly thought out plans” which ended up biting me in the butt.
This column is designed to share some of those bits of wisdom and knowledge I have learned with you, so that you might avoid the same mistakes I have seen or made over the years. Trust me, after working in the computer field for over 20 years, I have made a LOT of them! It’s been a very good thing that for most of those years I was the "boss", because most "bosses" would probably have fired me a long time ago.
So from time to time, I will post "A Word to the Wise". They will be based on my first hand knowledge of real life situations that I have encountered and had to deal with. Any and all names have been changed or removed to protect the innocent and to allow the guilty to continue to play dumb.
One of my favorite examples of 20/20 hindsight is related to a client who, in their infinite wisdom, chose to locate their computer room directly underneath a bathroom on the floor above. Not once, but twice they paid me to rebuild their computer room infrastructure after a pipe burst and a sink overflowed. These events did pay for a cruise or two for me, but being woken up twice in the very dark hours of the night to be told in a panic that there is WATER coming out the door of the computer room is not really my idea of fun.
The costs in down time and lost productivity caused from these outages were far more than the cost of relocating the data center. Why not move it after the first flood? Response: Why should we? It could never happen again.
Not only could it, it in fact it did. Twice more.
There is a funny thing about computers. It sometimes seems like they know exactly when and what would be THE most inconvenient thing for them to do to totally mess up your day. A long time ago, back when I was a FidoNet Sysop, we used to have a long standing joke about how we would never let the computer that was running your BBS hear that you were going out of town. We used "code expressions" when we needed to talk about when we would be on the road.
My favorite expressions were to talk about going how we were going to be “in the kitchen making sandwiches”. Somehow, I don’t understand how, but it never failed. If you were unlucky enough to let your PC hear that you were going away, a system that had run flawlessly for the last 90 days would lock up, wheels up in a most spectacular way, right before you left. Usually, the one thing that would mess your schedule up in the worst way would be the one thing most likely to happen.
A Word to the Wise