Great Pains.
With apologies to Dennis Miller: Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here, but I take great pains to minimize the amount of impact that the routine maintenance of servers has upon my users, and I get really annoyed when the University physical plant people can't give me the same consideration. For instance, this morning, they closed the parking lot I use so that they could paint new lines in it. I've paid $250 for the privilege of parking in that reserved and gated lot for this year, and now I've Iost another day of that. Do you think I can get a $0.75 refund? Nope. The lot I park in has 23 spaces, and the guy doing it told me it would take about an hour, then the lot would be re-opened. Is there some reason they couldn't have done this before or after normal working hours? Or on a Saturday? Sure, the University doesn't want to pay any possible overtime, nor do the people doing it want to work those hours. So, I get to go attempt to find a parking space with the unwashed masses, and thanks to all of our new construction plans, in which we tear out a parking lot every 6 months, and never build new ones, I wind up parking nearly as far from my office as my house is.

That's pretty much the way the whole summer has gone here at UNI, I call it "The Summer of Inconvenience." The power was shut off to our building for a day, I've been unable to park in my spot twice because construction workers have blocked the entrance to the lot with their semi trucks and earthmovers. The building I work in is now surrounded on three sides by construction projects, and I have to walk 300 yards to reach my car that is parked 50 yards from my office. This Friday, they're shutting off air conditioning and sewage lines to our building. I'm starting to feel like Job.

At least the Physical Plant people finally relented on one of their plans after a campus-wide uproar when they wanted to power off two other buildings, each for a weekday, one of which contains the central router and networking equipment for campus, the other contains all the servers. That would have been two more days when no one on the entire campus could have used a computer for any significant functions, as they wouldn't even have received IP addresses or been able to read their e-mail. Our campus work is apparently planned by the same people who thought it was a good idea to paint the Hindenburg with a substance very similar to solid rocket propellant.

Contrast that with how I do things: this weekend, when I knew I needed to install Service Pack 3 for Windows 2000 on my servers, and I did it on a Saturday, so few to no users would be affected, and I wouldn't get dozens of angry phonecalls. Yesterday, a fan on one of the servers started failing, so we waited until 6:00 p.m. to down the server and remove it. All planned maintenance is done off-hours, to minimize impact on people attempting to do their jobs, now doesn't that make sense? Wouldn't it also make sense to have maintenance people work a swing shift, so that their work could be completed at a time when the buildings aren't in use, or at least at maximum occupancy?

My point is that my users would never tolerate that level of disruption to their services, so why should I? Well, I'm not going to, I'm staying home on Friday, and I'm going to telecommute. I'm counting it as a day at work, too. Apparently, the University doesn't expect me to actually work here that day, or they'd provide the necessary services (like indoor plumbing) so I'll just stay at home, set the air conditioning at 75 degrees, and drink copious amounts of caffeine and other diuretics.

Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
- posted by Seth @ 11:29 AM