For reasons too personal to be interesting, Christmas brings out the worst in me. My happiest Christmas was spent covering for a DBA colleague. I was on double time, and sitting in a nice quiet spot in the Server Room where only swipe-card holders could enter. (We somehow neglected to issue swipe-cards to the management. It must have slipped our minds). I was contentedly sipping a sherry and gazing at performance monitor as one does with a Lava Lamp, relishing its calming, hypnotic, qualities. ‘God rest you merry’… A deep peace was all around me.

Just then, a disk failed in a SCSI array on a critical database.

I knew that, if another one went, it meant big trouble. I was working for a Telecommunications company, and Christmas day generated one of the peak revenue days for the company in the entire year, as people phoned home. Putting down my sherry-glass, I rummaged around the store cupboard to slot another one in. There wasn’t one. I phoned the DBA at his home. ‘Hello, it’s Phil here. I’m at work.’ There was a scream of overexcited children in the background, blowing off an E-number binge by quarrelling noisily.

‘Ah yes’, he said wistfully

’18 Gig SCSI drive gone tits’, I told him, lapsing into esoteric jargon.

‘Ooh,’ he exclaimed hopefully,’ do you think I ought to come over?’

‘No need.’ I responded, cruelly. Christmas, as I’ve already explained, does that to me. ‘Just tell me where the spare 18 Gig SCSIs are kept. Even I know how to hot-swap a drive in a RAID array.’

‘Hmm. No spares, we don’t carry them any more. We were hoping to get a new RAID array with larger-capacity drives after Christmas’.

‘So what is the solution?’

‘We have a service-level agreement with the supplier that guarantees a two-hour response time. Just give them a ring and let them do the worrying’.

After a long wait, ringing the supplier, then probably the largest providers of Enterprise-level servers in the world, a voice answered.

‘Hello’ said the voice irrelevantly

‘I’m with xxxxx Company, and we have an maintenance agreement with you for our servers.’ I quoted the reference numbers.

‘Mo’. There was a tapping on a keyboard at the other end after which he came back and asked what the problem was.

’18 Gig SCSI drive has handed in the dinner pail, it has croaked.’.

‘Oh, I’ll just put you on hold while I put you through’.

then the ‘calming’ music…
‘….When it snows ain’t it thrilling
Though your nose gets a chilling
We’ll frolic and play
the Eskimo way
walking in a winter wonderland…..’

Aargh! Any residual pining to be celebrating a festive Xmas in the bosom of my family died at that moment. A ‘Bob Cratchitt’ chill entered my heart.

The music suddenly stopped. I was through to someone technical just as the life force was starting to drain away.

‘Sorry to trouble you today.’ I started.

‘No trouble at all. I’m on double time. Its quiet here. I’m only too pleased to speak to a fellow human.’

I wondered briefly who he had been speaking to. A salesman?

I explained the problem and read out the full product code.

He sucked through his teeth. ‘Sorry, we can’t do you. There isn’t another one of those in the country. They’ll have to come over from the States. It’ll be ten days, I guess.’

‘I thought we had maintenance contract with a two-hour response time with your company’,

There was a pause. I assume he was drawing himself up to his full height ‘Well, he said rather huffily, ‘we did respond within two hours. We responded rapidly, and efficiently, by telling you it was going to take ten days.’

I sighed and put the phone down. It was the season of goodwill after all, and I assumed the guy I was speaking to had overdone the Office Party. I had a brief dream of trudging through the Bleak Mid Winter snow like good King Wenceslas on the feast of Stephen, looking for 18 Gb SCSI drives in PC World.

The solution proved to be simple. The test server, luckily, was an identical twin of the production one, and kept synchronised with it. A drive was taken from it and popped in the production RAID array. Within an hour I was back at peace with the world, sipping sherry and listening to Rammstein through headphones, as I ministered to the server.

Ten days later, a dispatch rider solemnly ran up the steps of the company into reception, carrying an 18 Gig SCSI drive, and proudly made us sign for it as if it were a holy relic. We dropped it straight in the bin, because the new Raid Array from our next IT supplier was clicking away happily in the rack.

I’ve never since retained any faith in maintenance agreements that promise rapid response times, unless they spell out exactly what constitutes a response. Ours didn’t..