John was having an impossible day. The final data center migration did not work. His site was handling the full bank volume on a machine that was partitioned to handle slightly over half the banking volume easily. Adding insult to injury his boss’s boss was calling trying to find out why the other data center had not come up this morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d John answered for the fifteenth time. \u201cMine has been running for over a week just fine. Right now it is gasping for air trying to handle the complete banking transactional volume for a Monday morning in the U.S. Do you have any idea just how many cash station transactions there are to post right now?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, find out and get back to me,\u201d said the voice on the other end of the phone line.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t even know where that data center is, let alone have its phone number,\u201d responded John. \u201cI don\u2019t even have enough people at work today to handle the things we normally handle without getting tied up in this matter. I\u2019ve been told Big Four Consulting is working with the bank to solve the problem. That is all I know now and all I knew two hours ago when you called the first time. I have to go fill in for one of my employees who didn\u2019t make it in today. You were supposed to get me more workers here. How is that coming?\u201d<\/p>\n
John knew exactly how it was coming. The employees had voted to bring in a union and the company was refusing to pay union wage. Unions currently had a lot of clout with the government. There were soon to be some government officials dragging the company heads into a room with the union officials. If the union slapped down the same contract they had signed at several other places with government negotiators helping, it would be a kangaroo court. The government officials would simply tell the corporation this was the same contract approved at four other companies within a reasonable distance of here and that they must agree to it.<\/p>\n
Everybody here knew the place needed more workers. The consulting company had brought in two more data center offshoring projects. John needed at least three more people to handle the network communications configurations, let alone regular computer operators.<\/p>\n
Judging from the number of developers requesting printouts, they must be selling a lot of software development work with these contracts. John was rather shocked when several high-speed continuous-form printers were installed. He had read about green bar paper, but never actually seen tractor-fed paper like that until the printers were installed. They were all manner of noisy and generated a lot of paper dust. It turned out some things still needed to be printed that way and some programmers preferred getting their listings on continuous form rather than off a laser printer. The laser printer could do far more formatting, but the line printer was faster and continuous-form kept all of the pages in order. Laser-printed listings were impossible to keep in order, they had told John.<\/p>\n
The really bad part about today wasn\u2019t that John\u2019s data center was understaffed. It wasn\u2019t even the fact John\u2019s data center wasn\u2019t in the least way involved with the problem. The bad part was John\u2019s boss had pulled a duck-and-cover move. He offered up John\u2019s name and pointed his boss in John\u2019s direction. Now, they knew his name and his voice. John made a mental note to send an email tonight requesting a new identity kit.<\/p>\n
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You are reading a special promotional version of \u201cInfinite Exposure\u201d containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:<\/p>\n