Kathryn was sitting in her office fuming. Migration of the final data center had not gone smoothly. They’d had no significant problems migrating the other data centers, but this last one was under the impression they were being expanded, not migrated. As a result, everyone working there refused to assist in even the slightest way. The job to migrate final data changes never ran. Some buffoon on the team thought because the disk farms were integrated that all of the data should be there anyway and there was no need to migrate anything. Boy, were they wrong!
On Sunday morning when the system restart test happened and the last data center wasn’t booted, nothing worked. Each system in that group had a security ID file which had to be exchanged during system startup to allow the disk farm to be shared. Nobody had mentioned that little tidbit, so when they tried to start two data centers in India instead of one in India and one in the U.S. Only half of the bank locations could log on.
Why didn’t the fail-over work? Nobody bothered to turn off the communications equipment in the U.S. Location. In theory they would have all failed over to the Indian location, but a sequence of events stopped that from happening. The first problem was the communications equipment was still running. It would have noticed the system wasn’t running if someone had turned it off. They never turned off the other system, they simply stopped the application. None of the IT staff working at the U.S. Data center had reported for work on Sunday. Nobody had bothered to contact Kathryn so she could start ringing Kent and Margret’s cell phones. This was a debacle and someone was going to be calling Kathryn on the carpet for it.
To add insult to injury, Kathryn had come in late this morning. She didn’t arrive at the office until 9:30 AM. She didn’t find out about the problem from her own team, either. She found out when Kent called her cell phone. Someone was holding his feet to the fire and he was offering up Kathryn. So much for all of those short skirts and heels she had left to keep Kent’s mind elsewhere.
Kathryn was on her cell phone to Margret as she was heading out to her car. She grabbed a couple of the young studs who were supposedly intelligent enough to be on this project to bring with her. They were supposed to have been at the data center this weekend along with one other to supervise the migration and the subcontractor. The third young stud who was on the short list to be out the door had called in sick this morning. He would probably get his termination notice by courier later today.
Adding more insult to injury was the fact Kathryn had the worst case of cramps she had ever had in her life. She had been up half the night with them. That was the reason she was late this morning. She told the studs to drive their own transportation over to First Global. She didn’t tell them they wouldn’t have jobs by the end of the meeting as she needed them cooperating now.
“What happened this weekend, Margret?” “I don’t know. You were supposedly handling this migration. I was just around to advise.” “Why didn’t any of your people report to work on Sunday?” “They all resigned on Saturday when the migration started. They assumed they wouldn’t have jobs once the migration was complete since everybody else had been let go within two weeks of their data center being migrated.” “Don’t they realize they won’t be able to use your company as a reference when they go looking for other jobs?” “We never provide references, only confirm dates of employment. We don’t even confirm salary information, just job title. No way to legally deny providing that information.” “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. What has been done to rectify the situation so far?” “I had someone go in and power down the machines at the data center. Most of the branch locations are now up and running, but we are running on a single data center. This has to be resolved in under twenty-four hours now. The primary outage was less than the twelve-hour window, but we have less than twenty-four hours left to get another data center up and running.” There was that rule again. The one Margret had swatted Kathryn between the eyes with nearly a year ago.
“Is the high bandwidth connection still up?” Margret asked.
“I have no idea at this point. I have two of the team who were supposed to supervise this coming with me. If this isn’t resolved shortly they aren’t going to have jobs.”
“Let me guess: these are the guys you had over in India before?” “Yes,” responded Kathryn and hung up.
Margret wasn’t slow. Kathryn had to give her that. She had caught onto the fact their careers would end long before their lives after getting a hint about their exploits in the red-light district.
A while later they were all seated in the conference room at First Global headquarters trying to figure out how to undo this mess.
“If we bring up the communications equipment and the machines we will be right back in the same boat,” said Margret.
“Are we sure we only need one file copied over?” Kent asked. Everyone in the room was shocked he grasped that much of the situation.
“We won’t know until we try,” responded Margret. “Since we cannot bring up the external communications equipment, we can only bring up the machine, FTP the file to a notebook, then communicate out via wi-fi or dial-up. Do you have an email address of someone they can send it to at the site in India which needs it?” Margret asked looking at Kathryn.
“Yes, those two both have email addresses we can send to and cell phone numbers they can call to ensure the file got there. Is there anyone at the data center they can work with now?”
“One of the IT workers from this office is over there now.” Margret scratched out a phone number for them to call and told them to use the phone here in the conference room. She then turned to her laptop and followed through the links on the company intranet to find the system startup documentation for the data centers. Once she found it she looked at Kathryn. “Tell one of the skirts you left here who has an account on the system to bring her notebook in here and work with these two.”
Kathryn didn’t even notice the slight. She got up and walked out to get one of the skirts. Kent did notice it, though, and said, “Margret, there is no reason to insult people. They are trying to help us.”
“They are the ones who got us into this situation, Kent. This should have all been fixed on Sunday. We are now less than six hours from the FDIC showing up at our doorstep asking for a full accounting of the situation. Are you going to be the one waiting for them at the doorstep?”
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