Heath and I both got an email from our manager to look into a problem with <SoftwareProduct>. It was high priority concern, so we dropped everything to work on it.

Unfortunately, the folks who usually work with <SoftwareProduct> had been up all night dealing with other problems with <SoftwareProduct> and were stacking Zs. Heath and I were comparative rookies to <SoftwareProduct> and it showed.

The customer said that they couldn’t access the fritzenjammer and were wondering if we needed to run the gizmotron. We knew how to run the gizmotron but didn’t know if that would fix the fritzenjammer. We searched through the documentation but couldn’t find a connection between the two. We also worried about whether running the gizmotron unnecessarily would cause a problem.

After a while, we ran the gizmotron anyway and it did solve the problem with the fritzenjammer. We patted our backs for guessing correctly.

I went back to my email. The one previous to the high priority alert was a notification that the gizmotron was down and needed to be restarted. If we’d read that earlier, we’d’ve avoided an awful lot of the handwringing.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere. Maybe “Don’t drop everything.”