Kathryn and Margret were in the conference room till almost noon on the Monday morning after the disastrous data center migration attempt. Finally, once all of the startup files had been verified and the new security file installed, the second Indian data center came online running the application. The machine load balancing operation began and the intra-day audit job was scheduled for about 1:00 PM. The communications load balancer recognized it, had another machine to route requests to, and started splitting them off. The machine in India, which had been shouldering the entire load, had its utilization drop below 90 percent and response times began to improve.<\/p>\n
Margret told Pete to power things down in the data center and come back after the girls took him out for a sit-down lunch. She told him to be sure and pick a nice place as Big Four Consulting was buying.<\/p>\n
The legal team from Big Four had arrived about an hour ago and had been holed up in Carol\u2019s cubical. The one brief comment Margret heard from Carol was that these were contract lawyers and not skilled in giving depositions. They may have been deposed a few times themselves, but they had never conducted a deposition.<\/p>\n
At any rate it was in the lawyer\u2019s hands now. The skirt who had been helping was told she could go back to her desk. Margret called Carol from the conference room to say it was all hers now. Kathryn told the other two to wait here and answer some questions. If they had half a brain she expected them to try to pin everything on the one who called in sick this morning. That wouldn\u2019t change anything. All three of them were supposed to have been there on Saturday morning and to have contacted Kathryn if there were any problems.<\/p>\n
Once they were out of the conference room Kathryn asked Margret, \u201cCan I use the phone in your office with the door closed? I need to speak with someone in HR about the process and to let them know the lawyers will be in with them shortly.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCertainly,\u201d replied Margret. \u201cI don\u2019t know if the two of them will be enough, though. It depends on what Carol comes up with for our FDIC notification letter. They may wish to come here and have a chat with us. I don\u2019t know how she is going to gloss over the fact our entire data center staff quit in protest.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe one and only question I have for them is did they even show up on Sunday morning? The only explanation that makes any sense at all is they conned the one guy into handling it who called in sick today. I don\u2019t know if he called in sick on Sunday as well, but that would make it all fit together. I assigned all three of them, but if they thought only one needed to be there and the one who was supposed to be there bailed on them, it would explain things. Nobody called because nobody was there,\u201d concluded Kathryn.<\/p>\n
Margret went to lunch and came back to see security escorting the two gentlemen out of the building. She saw Kathryn and went over to her. \u201cWe told them we would ship their personal belongings to them from our office. I took their badges so they cannot get in our building. Our lawyers wanted them escorted out of your building to reduce our liability.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd what of the third?\u201d inquired Margret.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t fire him. He did call in sick late Saturday afternoon. He called the office and both of their cell phones. They didn\u2019t take his call \u2013 they admitted to that. They partied until 4:00 AM and slept through it. The third guy had a legitimate excuse. He just called in to work from the hospital still groggy. On Saturday night he was taken into the hospital with what turned out to be an appendicitis. They did surgery early Sunday morning once they figured out what was wrong with him. His appendix had actually burst so he will be in the hospital another three days.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWow,\u201d responded Margret. \u201cHe managed to make three phone calls with a burst appendix?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe wonder of youthful endurance,\u201d said Kathryn. \u201cIt gets even better, though. He didn\u2019t have my cell phone number on him because it was in the folder at home and he was on his way to the hospital in a friend\u2019s car. The voicemail he left was for me. Our voicemail system is supposed to either ring or text our cell phones when we get a new voice message. I didn\u2019t get a message because it was never sent. The voicemail system was being upgraded over the weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCarol has all of this?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of it, yes. So do our lawyers. These guys didn\u2019t even bother to try calling in sick. I guess they won\u2019t be such good pals with the guy who is keeping his job. HR is putting it in their jacket that they were fired for cause. I believe Carol is going to state that you were changing out machines over the weekend, a problem was encountered, but the two people in charge of monitoring and notifying didn\u2019t bother to show up for work. Their employer has since terminated them and the new machine was in place in a timely manner while the second data center shouldered the burden. We are going to have to adjust the capacity of the machine at that data center so if this were to happen again it won\u2019t peg at 98 percent utilization.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMonday morning is the worst possible time for this,\u201d volunteered Margret. \u201cSince the bank systems are traditionally down on Sunday, the ATM withdrawals and deposits get queued up at the service bureau all day. They hit us as soon as the systems come back up, usually sometime Sunday evening.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou allow withdrawals without your systems being up?\u201d asked Kathryn.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn Sunday, it doesn\u2019t matter what limit you set for your account, you can only get up to $200. A few have exploited the policy, but not that many. We are not usually down that long on Sunday and usually it is one data center at a time so it is a very narrow window for them to hit, not always at the same time of day.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe also have a job which usually runs before shutdown suspending the cards of anyone who is overdrawn or has less than $200 in their account, so it usually isn\u2019t a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Margret went on to find out from Carol if she had all she needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d responded Carol. \u201cI have filed the report with the FDIC telling them we were changing out machines and had a problem with a security file that took us a while to track down.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you told them nothing about the machine being offshored?\u201d \u201cDidn\u2019t put it in the report, no. We\u2019ll wait and see if they inquire further. We were up within the allotted time so I don\u2019t think there will be any further inquiry.\u201d \u201cGood.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few hours later Kent was sitting in his office when the phone rang. He feared the worst. He was surprised when the call was from an analyst from Langston Group looking to interview him over the phone. Kent knew this was part of the arrangement. He had a cheat sheet of things to say prepared by Kathryn. He dug it out and began responding to the questions. Odd how the cheat sheet matched the order of the questions almost exactly. When the interview was complete Kent asked, \u201cI take it Pytho Corporation is about to announce their software product?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey announced this morning. This interview will appear in our newsletter going out next week.\u201d<\/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