Tuesday, January 23, 2018

2018-01-23

Gah. What a day. The plan was for me to spend most of the day (though probably not all of it) cleaning up after a data import that ran into some issues. While two other items, a data table copy and a conference call regarding another potential data extraction, were also on my calendar, each should've only eaten 30 minutes of my day, leaving me plenty of time and focus for the bigger task.

Only the data table copy took longer than it should have because users were logged in to the database we were copying to, defying all common sense. After getting them out and successfully completing the transfer, I was asked about another table they were supposedly expecting to be copied, too. It turned out that not only had no one mentioned this table before, but the client didn't have a support contract in place to cover this second table. So, goodbye: sales' problem now.

This left me irritated, but at least the conference call went fairly smoothly and quickly. Afterwards, though, I found myself having to take an incoming phone call for IT, with a client who was suddenly unable to access the EMR software we host for them "in the cloud" (read: virtualized servers located in a secure Network Operations Center). In troubleshooting the issue (which of course took my focus away from the data import), I soon learned that it was being caused by a troublesome firewall at the NOC, and therefore impacted many more clients than just this one. The techs that went to the NOC ultimately had to replace the firewall, and naturally that process knocked the rest of our hosted clients offline as well.

Much of the rest of my day was spent fielding more of these calls, and then returning them later once everything had been addressed and the clients were able to connect again. No one's fault, but it was very frustrating that the one thing I'd intended to finish today was the one thing on which I couldn't concentrate for more than half an hour at a time. Well, tomorrow's another day.

Wait, was that supposed to sound optimistic?

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