“It’s not so bad. We have a system startup problem.” “We have a twenty-four-hour recovery period per the FDIC regulations. After that, we are no longer insured. I’m certainly not going to be in the room when the board of directors gets that little bit of news.” Invoking the board of directors, Margret now had Kent’s complete attention. “What do you need me to do?” “I need you to talk to Carol and let her know we have a situation. Then I need you to ask her if she wants to be in here while it happens or if she wants plausible deniability.” Kent’s eyes went wide, but he got up and left. Kathryn returned with one of the skirts who sat with the guys. Margret looked at her and said, “Send me an email so I can reply with the link to the information they are going to need.” With the emails exchanged and the person at the data center on the speaker phone, the team set about getting the system started. They used the boot option to avoid starting the banking application automatically.
“Pete,” said Margret, “I need you to copy the security file off to your laptop. Is the internal network stuff still running?”
“Within the lab it is. I’m using a terminal emulator from my notebook to monitor the system.”
“OK. The others here are going to tell you what file to find keystroke by keystroke. Once you have it, ZIP it and they will give you an email address to send it to. Is the cable modem still working there?”
“I don’t know. I only have one network port and there isn’t a wireless hub on that thing.”
“I know. We didn’t want them surfing the Web in a manner that wasn’t monitored. Is there a modem-compatible phone jack?”
“There is a bank of modems over here. I can just keep hooking up until I find one that works.”
“Good. You have the remote VPN software on that notebook, don’t you?”
“Yes, it is how I do support at night. I will be able to send the email once I have the file. Is that all you need me to do?”
“Sadly you are going to have to stay there until we get the system in India up and running.”
“In that case, you are buying me lunch. Send someone over now so they can answer the door. There is nobody here, not even a receptionist. FedEx already showed up to drop one set of backup media off and collect another. I had to tell them we didn’t have an outbound today.”
Kathryn looked at Margret. “Do you have a link with directions and a street address on that site?”
“I’m looking for that now. Here it is.” “Good. Send it to her,” Kathryn said looking at the skirt. “Once you get it, forward it to both of the others out there with a message to print it out and get in here now!” Five minutes later both of the other skirts cautiously crept into the room.
“Pete,” said Kathryn, “I have two girls here who will be coming over to answer the door, phone, and help you any way they can. Do you want them to pick up lunch on the way there?”
“No, they could pick up a plain bagel with regular cream cheese and a bottle of iced tea, though. Too early for lunch. Do they know how to get here?”
“They have the directions from the intranet in their hot little hands. Is there an extension where you are sitting that they can call when they get there? I’m assuming they can’t walk right in.”
“Yes, x5491. If they can’t get through, have them call one of you there in the conference room on your cell. I don’t know if the PBX is working here.”
Margret scratched her cell phone number down on the paper for the girls, as did Kathryn, then they sent them on their way. “Save the receipts if you want to be reimbursed,” Kathryn told the girls.
There was the sound of a modem dialing in the distance. A few minutes later there was some muttering on the end of the phone. Finally Pete spoke. “The email is on its way to India. They should have it in another minute or two. You know, I’m looking at the system startup files and the application startup files. It looks like about six of them were changed last week. Did we have something that went into production then?”
“Yes,” responded Margret. “A bunch of changes for the board of directors with respect to how things were reported. Those changes should have propagated out to the Indian site, too, since it was running in unison with this site.”
“In theory they should be there. Tell you what, I’m going to do some cutting and pasting between windows on this thing and send another email to that same address with instructions for them to verify the dates on these files on their end. These files are on a local drive here. That is why I’m concerned.”
“Sounds like a plan, Pete,” responded Margret. “Can’t hurt to be certain before we pull the trigger on application startup.”
Kent returned to the room. “Carol says she won’t join us in the war room, but would like to see the three of us in my office if we have a moment.”
“Pete,” Margret called out. “I’m going to leave the room with Kathryn for a quick meeting in Kent’s office. If I’m not back and you need me you have my cell phone.”
“That’s fine. It will be about half an hour before they can get things verified and send back an email.”
With that, the three walked out to Kent’s office where Carol was waiting.
“I don’t want details, but how bad is it?” Carol asked.
“They needed to get an updated security file over to the new system in India and didn’t do it. Once it is there we will probably have to run the program to update the system ID in it. There might be a couple of startup scripts which need to be copied over as well,” responded Margret.
“Thanks for not giving me any details,” remarked Carol.
Margret gave a faint smile. “It is not a train wreck. I just don’t know if we can sort it out within the time frame we have left.”
“That’s why I want to talk with you. We have some severe legal exposure here. I need to find out exactly what happened this weekend. If this goes on much longer someone is going to have to answer to a board of inquiry.”
Kathryn didn’t really believe this “end of the world” stuff she was hearing until she heard it from a lawyer. This was just a system outage to her. Embarrassing yes, but with legal implications? She hadn’t thought it possible until now.
Margret started, “When I came in this morning I had email from everyone working at the data center tendering their resignations effective immediately. It appears when the migration team showed up Saturday morning it honked off the data center workers. They sent me their resignations, logged out, and went home. The data center was completely unstaffed from around 9:30 AM Saturday until now.”
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