So its monday . . . yaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!

Who is happy for Mondays? me!

Q: Why?
A: As I predicted in my last post I was stepping into the standby week of hell.

Q: My relief today?
A: My boss came back to work after a two week leave and I am off standby duty :-)

It must have been planned, shortly after my boss left things fell apart and most of his responsibilites fell on my shoulders. At 3:00pm last week Monday I got a call from HP saying I need to shutdown the EVA8000 in my datacenter for critical repair work. Whats the EVA8000? its something that you don't power off, ever. This is the first time we are shutting down the eva8000 since we got it over a year ago and it's in my hands on that public holiday Monday. I got a window of 1 hour to do the maintenance work which was a few hours away so I quickly documented a shutdown plan/notification and sent it out to all the stakeholders who had dependencies on the eva8000(I also had to shutdown their machines due to this also). Try to imagine my bitter feelings as I called some managers telling them I will be bringing down their applications only to hear them at the beach having fun. Anyway after all the calls and the emails I went down to the datacenter, got the work done and was on my way home by 9:30pm :-(. End of Monday.
Tuesday brought on a whole different set of problems mostly I suspect due to issues we were having with the same hardware from Monday and I escalated all of them to the highest level, they were now partially out of my hands, HP is now sending down a specialist to sort us out.. right.
Wednesday/Thursday/Friday the specialist is here "fixing" the problem.. yet somehow we are in the exact same position we were in on Monday and he somehow stole my office space downtown. The problem is now 10x larger as my boss' boss is now asking me if its possible to schedule a business critical update on Saturday night. Now this update can only be done if I can get a process to complete successfully on Friday night. I gave him the grim statistics that this process has had a success rate of 1 in 3 over the past few days and he in turn tries to tell the business that it can not be done at this point in time. The business is not having it and they put the squeeze on him and of course he then puts the squeeze on me. We work with that 33% chance of getting it done and by some miracle it went through. At some point in time my boss' boss, the HOD, realized how much work was being done and called me and informed me that when my boss came back I can get two days extra off, yay! I can see myself sleeping on the empty beach, the only worries in my world would be the crabs on the sand.
Saturday/Sunday went by fairly smoothly. All things went as planned almost. They anounced the work being done to the system on Saturday night on the radio and the work started. I didn't hear a peep from a soul until 11:00am Sunday morning, when I got a call telling me the work is complete. It is my job now to test the integrity of the upgraded system, I told them to give me 20minutes as I was on the road on my way to visit my parents. I reach my parents house and of course a big argument starts between my mother and I over some old issues, I hook up my laptop, vpn into work.. the upgraded system is broken of course. After about an hour on a conference call with support from London and my mother arguing in the background all is well, the system is back up and I can have a civilized conversation with my mother. I then ate some food and left. On my way home, after a lot of thought I have decided to stop visiting them on Sundays, maybe they will see me once a month now. I refuse to deal with that added stress to my life at this point in time and it is avoidable, I hope they understand.
It is now Monday, a new week and a new chapter in my life. I have the next three weeks to kill before I am scheduled for standby again :-D