Robotic Bastard

Back to the battle with technology. Second day of waging near-constant war against backups. Like playing digital Jenga with the smoldering soul of an unblinking, multi-million dollar corporation. Pull out the wrong puzzle piece and the whole delicately crafted construct falls down around your trembling ears. Summoned all the king's horses. Summoned all the king's men. And we finally put Digital Dumpty back together again.

First piece was a new backup-to-disk solution that didn't behave. Finally spanked it until it complied. Of course that means half a dozen of us on the phone with three different accents and an over-eagerness to control the mouse.

Second piece was the backup server. It didn't like the new storage. And of course IBM can't modernize to an actual Graphical User Interace (GUI) so my morning is spent on the phone with one of their lead nerds as he talks me through the specific, arcane syntax required to reconfigure their command line interface (CLI.) Tedious, painful stuff. One wrong keystroke could have wiped everything. But we managed to get it stripped down to the bare bones and rebuilt properly.

Final piece was the tape silo. Robotic bastard. Refusing to play nice. Lost count of the number of inits and reboots and replaced tapes it took to make the sun/moons/stars line up correctly. Week of no training. Headache for lunch. Not even a pat on the back, or a pack of cigarettes, for ol' Johnny. Par for the course, though. All a part of the gig. Still glad to be employed. While wrestling robots still pays well.