According to the movie Pushing Tin airline traffic controllers have some of the most stressful jobs there is. While I fully agree the idea of controlling the fate of hundreds of lives can weigh quite heavily on anyone, I’m sure a sys admin’s work (in varying degrees), can rank amongst those as well.
Yuga of Yugatech.com blogged about Sassylawyer’s ongoing backup woes recently, and Ms. Connie has written about it as well (that link is bound to change as her blog isn’t fully online yet and she put up a static page for the moment).
While there certainly isn’t going to be a hundred dead bodies in a heap of burning airplane parts anytime soon, the stress of wondering whether your work has been laid to waste forever can reduce anyone to a distorted, weeping mass.
This was somewhat the case when my lawfirm client’s mailserver broke down the other week, and I had to put in a weekend plus pull a favor from the chief to get another machine running again.
The stress was partly due to the fact that the senior lawyers (aka moneybags), will not understand such a thing, and ergo not understand what one has to go through to get it going. All they know is that there’s no internet (it’s also a gateway / router), there’s no email and hence, their work is unduly disturbed. To be honest, it has crossed my mind as to how to explain to them how difficult that was, but that makes me feel like tooting my own horn really. For the moment I’m just glad the thing is working again.
Another thought is the eventual need to become a “mysql wrangler” so to speak, to complement one’s abilities to handle mysql – dependent applications like blogs, forums and the like. Like many web developers I’ve only rudimentary abilities in this (read: just enough to get by), surely not enough come disaster time.
I’m fairly sure Sassylawyer’s problems can be fixed by getting the current backup to work with the new schema, which means mysql work plain and simple. At that point, I’d need help. However, everytime I take time to learn mysql, I tend to forget it as I would need to work on something more timely at that moment.
Anyway, here’s hoping Sassy’s blog gets going soon. As of the moment there’s one nervous lawyer somewhere in Antipolo.
good luck to sassy lawyer!
mwah!