Remember last week me talking about how the bandwidth provider for my company decided to be just plain stupid and put the screws to my company, thus ensuring we would hate them forever? Guess what? They weren’t finished.
This morning, as I was walking out the door, literally, with one foot on my patio, I get a call from my boss. It went something like this:
He: “Did the domain transfer screw up our network name resolution?”
Me: “Not that I can think of. Let me check the transfer status.”
He: “Because we have no communication, again. No email, no web, no vpn.”
Me: “It looks like the domain name is still in the previous registrar approval phase. I am not sure what is causing our outage.”
He: “Could you call our sys admin to see if you can figure out what is happening. Right now we have no email, no web, no vpn.”
Me: “Sure thing, let me call him.”
I called my guy and together we came upon something a little different from the last outage last week. We started with our normal troubleshooting techniques: ping, tracert, dig. Very quickly we came to the conclusion that our DNS was not resolving again for some reason. The only difference between this time and the last time was that this time the DNS servers were not responding at all to our requests. I called my boss back and told him that I had given our sys admin the name and number of someone to talk to, even though my attempt at calling him was an epic fail. The phone went to voice mail, but they have not message center so I could not leave a message. Instead I was transferred to the switchboard where I was told that there is no known number and I was hung up on. Nice.
Knowing that my hands were tied at home I told my boss I would be in shortly and began my drive to work. When I got in about 30 minutes later my boss was on the phone. Wanna know with who? You guesses it. Our bandwidth provider.
Now I know you want to know this. What was the cause of this outage? Was it a catastrophic failure of a hard drive? Perhaps a full blown upstream network outage? Maybe a power outage? No. You’re going to love this…
We didn’t pay our bill.
What? Wait, we just took care of that last week didn’t we? Apparently not. See, the email that contained the invoice we were supposed to pay from never sent. Their paper invoice printing system has been offline for a few months so they could not send us a paper invoice. And apparently it was not noted anywhere in our account that we had spoken to their highest level AP person who had assured us that our services would not be terminated again. With that, someone who saw that our account was past due decided to pull our plug all over again.
Are there any further lessons to learn from this? Sure. Try not to be stupid more than once in a given weeks period of time. I tend to think that if that company were a person my boss would have driven to that person’s house and kicked that person’s butt halfway across their bandwidth pipe. Which might not be as far as I think seeing as they are now pretty much nothing more than a name and a phone number. That doesn’t allow messages or actually route to anyone.
I really don’t like starting a Saturday working on work stuff at home. Especially when I am not supposed to be working on a Saturday. I don’t mind working when I am supposed to be working, but when I am supposed to be making breakfast for my family or taking care of stuff at home I get a little testy that I have to interrupt that so that I can tend to things at work.
So it went this morning, when by 8:45 I was getting called on my home phone and cell phone that there were things breaking left and right and why was this happening and what is going on? Huh?
It started with a frequent background job failing but not notifying. It then led to a series of other issues including an intranet that went down, an account management app that went down and our core site that went down. Coupled with that were all of the background jobs and middleware apps that were not transferring data as expected. Things were not working so me and a few fellow co-workers were.
The cause of the situation ended up being a few other nightly jobs running, killing something and never bringing those somethings back up. Then another job decided to reboot a server but not bring it back up properly. This in effect made all of the other servers that talk to the one that was reboot to stop talking to it. It happens. Anyone that has ever worked in an IT environment knows things like this happen.
But when handled properly it only happens the same way once. A second time means you didn’t learn from the first. Screwing up is inevitable and should be handled with grace and understanding the first time it happens. Any subsequent (and by that I mean the second time only… after that more than one person is to blame for these issues) instances of failure like this indicates an inability to learn from your own mistakes and should not, in my opinion, be handled with the same amount of grace and understanding as the first time. I know that may sound harsh, but that is the reality of living in a real-time environment in which money transacts and businesses serve.
The incident this morning was a case in point. Nothing that took place this morning should have taken place this morning. In fact, a remedy for this situation was put in place, for a different identical server, just a few days ago. So it begs the question, if an identical machine bought at the same time experienced something like this and was fixed, why would it’s twin not be fixed? You get my point.
What ended up happening is that three people, one of whom was me, ended up spending non-work time working because of an error on the part of another teammate of ours didn’t learn from the last time something like this happened. Yes, I am complaining about a teammate. We all are, or at least should be, held to the same level of accountability in everything we do as a unit. And this does not just hold true for work. It can easily be applied to sports, families, friendships and businesses.
I love my job. If I come across in a way that indicates anything otherwise please don’t hesitate to call me out on that. I actually look forward to coming into the office and taking care of business everyday with the team I work with. I appreciate their knowledge, their expertise and their experience. This is very much like my family, and more specifically my wife, whose experience and knowledge provides a wealth of protection to me and my family. My team at work provides a similar level of protection to our team at work.
That is the nature of a team environment. We protect us. We advance us. We are us. Every person on the team should take the responsibility for the success of the team and do whatever it takes to maintain a high level of accountability to the team to see to it that the team succeeds. If that is done then Saturdays can be spent as a normal Saturday and my blog post for today could have been about something entirely more pleasant than this.
This morning I was faced with an extraordinary issue when I got to work. We had no network services to our domain name. And apparently I was the one that was supposed to know why this was.
After looking closely at what was happening, and realizing that emails had not been received to our mail server for a time, and that none of our web sites were running, and that users of our VPN were calling complaining that they could not connect to the network for some reason it dawned on my that it was time to check our domain name servers.
A quick look as it was pretty apparent that our name servers zones were completely missing. After a little more time trying to figure out what was happening, and at the same time trying to vindicate myself from savage disciplinary action due to a recent domain name transfer request that has gone horribly awry, I finally came to the conclusion that our domain name provider (and our bandwidth provider) must have gone out of business last night. They have been on their last leg for quite some time and their services have tanked considerably. I figured this was the last leg of their journey into the toilet of despair.
I was wrong.
After following their horrible excuse of a menu system on their call-in support system I got to their new domain name providers (they have sold off every one of their divisions to other companies so I was actually talking to another company). At the same time I decided to call the guy that has been not helping transfer our corporate domain. While on hold with the new company I actually made contact with our current guy. And I found out something interesting: our zone files in their DNS server were removed because of failure to pay a bill.
Under normal circumstances I would say that this would make perfect sense from a business standpoint. Except for a few points:
- The amount we owed was $225. Our normal monthly bill is about $2,500.
- The last invoice they sent us was in May. For about $2,500.
- The last invoice was for bandwidth and domain name management services.
- Our DNS services were terminated because of an outstanding bandwidth invoice. Bandwidth remained online.
- They never sent a bill for the outstanding amount.
- They never attempted to contact us for the outstanding amount.
- They have been providers of our for more than 10 years.
- We are their biggest account.
That said I would say their handling of this case was an epic FAIL. Worse yet, the one guy that any answers for us (one of four remaining employees with the company) had no access to their systems, billing or otherwise, and was only able to add our zone files back. He was not able to transfer calls, take payments or offer any other insight into what was happening. He couldn’t even give us the phone number of their account person so we could contact her to straighten this out.
Once my director of IT was able to actually traverse their phone support system and get in touch with the woman that handles their billing and accounting it came to light that they never did send us an invoice and that we were apparently supposed to be mind readers when it came to paying for stuff we may or may not have used.
Ultimately the situation ended with my boss receiving confirmation that he would indeed receive an invoice that he could send to the AP department here so they could pay it and get us out of hock. And after a few minutes of downtime we were back on the air.
Now I know there are lessons to learn from all of this. But I think it would have been more useful and helpful if our service providers had taken to learning those lessons before shutting down a US$100M company for a stupid $225 invoice that was, get this, only 45 days late.
Wanna keep your customers happy? Try communicating with them. It would have made all the difference in this case.
Few things carry with it the pageantry, showmanship and stigma of the Olympic Games. The best athletes in the world coming together in international competition on quite possibly the largest stage some of them will ever see. Media hounding everyone at every turn. Entire cities rebuilt to accommodate the athletes, fans, coaches, supporters and staff.
And coming around once every four years certainly helps the hype. If nothing more it certainly offers a unique excuse to children to stay up later than normal, jump off of things they would not usually be allowed to jump off of and shout at the TV like dad does on Sundays during the football season.
Strangely the one thing about the Olympics, the bringing together of families to enjoy something in the company of each other instead of being off Facebooking, MySpacing, Texting or something else, is the same thing that gives me the biggest issue of contention with the Olympics. My family has been consumed by these games.
Regardless of the sport, from swimming to gymnastics to beach volleyball, my wife can sit and watch the games all night. My kids have been staying up until midnight or later so they can watch the Olympics, which “only come around every four years”, with mom. And I think I have had my fill of it.
I like sport as much as the next guy, and I am all for the spirit of competition that the Olympics bring. But dude, I am on freaking Olympics overload. I am ready for the games to end already. I want my TV, my family and my nights back. Family TV night is great, but not when it starts at 9:00 PM and goes through 1:00AM the next morning and only includes mom and the two older girls.
And I think it would be better if even the non-mainstream sports made it on to TV. I would love to see some wrestling or shooting or table tennis. Not the most popular, certainly not the biggest named athletes in the world in these events, but still, the Olympics are more than just swimming, gymnastics and tack & field.
Still, I am enjoying what little of the games I am letting myself consume. They have been exciting and even breathtaking at times. But I have a feeling when these games are over I will be a little happier for their departure than their arrival.
Holy crap what did I NOT do today…
- Woke up at 6:30 to take Bekah to play tennis
- Made breakfast for everyone
- Picked up Sarah and Annah from grandma’s house
- Made lunch
- Cleaned some of the nasty kitchen
- Played the wii with the kids
- Handled quiet time
- Went for a walk with the kids
- Cleaned more of the nasty kitchen
- Removed Alaynah’s training wheels (at her request)
- Helped Alaynah a little bit with learning to ride a two wheeler
- Made dinner
- Cleaned up dinner
- Cleaned more of the nasty kitchen
- Handled (a longer than normal) bed time
- Started watching a movie
I say started to watch a movie because I only got part way through it. I feel asleep really hard in the middle of it. I know I was tired, but I was supposed to stay awake for one more thing…
My wife promised me some dessert tonight if I took care of dinner. It was actually a nice gesture since I was going to make dinner anyway and I have been dying for some dessert (it has been a while). I like having something to work for, not that I don’t always. But when your wife cuddles up to you and brings mention of dessert to the table in exchange for handling dinner… well, you have to think that making dinner just got that much better today.
I took care of dinner. But where is the dessert? Oh well, I am too tired for that anyhow.
I had a terrifying and horrifying realization this morning on my way to work: there are a lot of things a man should be able to do that I have never done. Scarier still, I have never even thought to do some of those things. This scared the hell out of me. The next thought that came to mind was that I had better set out to straightening this out before I never get around to doing it.
So I began to put together a list. And the list got bigger and bigger and bigger. And as of this writing it is now looking like:
Useful things I have never done
- I have never shot a gun
- I have never shot a bow
- I have never lit a fire without an accelerant
- I have never killed or skinned a hunted animal
- I have never stayed out in the wilderness overnight
- I have never tied something down that absolutely had to stay tied down
- I have never caught a fish
- I have never jumped a chasm
- I have never dove into open water (lake, sea, whatever)
- I have never built a house
- I have never fixed a broken car, motorcycle or bicycle
As I began to think of all the things that I have never done but should have done by the time I was 16 I realized that my entire life as a man has been spent on other things outside of the necessities of a man’s necessary knowledge. Men need to know how to do those things on my list of things not yet done.
That’s right. As I looked on that list I began to assert my desires and intents as a man. I fully intend to do each and every one of those things on that list. Within the next two years.
And hopefully at the same time I will be able to test some other boundaries of mine as well. That was another thought that crept in as I was coming to these conclusions earlier this morning. I have almost completely lost the sense of boundary testing that all males seem to have. When was the last time I did something that scared the crap out of me and gave me the willies like never before? How about you, when was the last time you scared almost to the point of skinning out?
I long for that. I think. But I didn’t realize it until today. I need an adventure. I need to test myself. And I sure as hell need to put myself in a position of handling those things on my list. I say I start with hunting and move from there.
I have been going through a major transformation in my life the past few weeks. Most of this transformation has stemmed from the fact that a few weeks ago I came to a life shattering conclusion that I have been a coward for a very long time. Somewhere in my life I decided that it was more important to make people feel good than to do the right thing. And because of this decision I made, Lord knows when, my life has been a series of bad decisions based on someone’s tears, fears, angst or discontent.
The effects of a cowardly man are far reaching. Everything that requires the strength of a man are shot to hell when a man refuses to be strong. And I believe things are designed to be that way. Men are made strong so we can use our strength. We are made aggressive so we can be aggressors. We are made to withstand because we need to withstand. It is in our makeup. Strength is not supposed to be something that looks good on a model or handles itself well under circumstance, strength is a meant to a be a lifestyle, a characteristic that is exuded daily by all men.
I have not lived that lifestyle. I have indeed allowed myself to be swayed by many different circumstances. And in so doing I have surrendered my position as a man, a leader and head of household to my wife. I have not only stripped myself of the authority and dominion inherent to me as a man but I have also placed my wife in a position where her identity as a woman is cloudy because of the things she has to do because I have chosen not to do them.
One area of long standing contention in my marriage has been finances. I am the sole provider of the house and have been for about five years or so. In the 13 years that Sandi and I have been married she has worked outside of the home for about five years with the remaining eight years being spread out over several periods in our marriage when we had new children or some other life event allowed/necessitated her be home with the kids.
Up until a few years ago I had managed the money in our home. I was diligent, relentless and incredibly passionate about making sure our bills were paid and our obligations met. I had the bank account balanced against my register every morning. I knew, to the penny, how much money I had available to my at any given point of any given day. I was on it.
Unfortunately at that time we did not make a whole lot of money so even though I had things firmly under control we did not really have a lifestyle. We had kids, a place to live, cars to drive and a little bit of food in the fridge. But that was about it. And Sandi felt like she was being locked out of the finances.
So in response to her feelings I decided to offer control of the finances to her. I am not one for two people handle the same task at the same time so I told her that she could have it if she was willing to take it all. She agreed and a few years back I gave her everything I had in relation to our finances. And you know what? For a couple of years she did a kick ass job of making sure everything was handled appropriately just as I had done. She also saw to it that there was money for other lifestyle type things so we were not always so stuffed on what we could do or when.
She even made sure our credit improved. From very early on in my adult life I seemed to do everything under the sun to make sure that my credit was craptastic. She actually improved our credit standing and in late 2005 we began taking on credit again. It was nice to be able to qualify for things that required good credit because had, for so long, been such a huge credit risk that we were either completely unable to do things based on credit or we paid a huge premium for doing things on credit. So I felt great about her handling the money and the success we were having.
In September of 2006 I changed jobs. I began to earn about 50% more than I was earning at my old job. We had lots more money and what appeared to be a growing lifestyle. And then things began to take a turn for the worse in our finances. We had amassed an enormous amount of debt. Things were not getting paid. We began to get calls from creditors. We began to not have money. This was about summer 2007.
Being faced with some troubling circumstances ahead I made a few decisions and didn’t make a few others that led to an increased lack in my household. The long and short of it is that I ended up costing my family my retirement to get us out of hock in June 2007. The biggest bills were paid, some smaller ones were paid off completely. We put some money (about $6,000) into savings and put a little more (about $2,500) into savings for our children ($500 each for five kids). It felt good, but in a bad way. While the bills were paid and we had some savings immediately I knew that withdrawing $60,000 worth of my retirement would have a negative effect on our lives.
Spring forth to December 2007. Even though we had paid off almost all of our debt just six months earlier we were maxed out again. I had about $200 cash to spend on Christmas for my entire family, my wife and my kids. My credit cards were shut off or at their limits. Times were tough. Bills were not getting paid again. Calls were coming in again. The kids began to understand that Privacy Manager, or 1-800 Services on the phone meant that neither mom nor dad wanted to take that call. In January of this year I was faced with another decision to make.
I chose to borrow against my paid off car so I could pay down our American Express bill. Again. We paid a few others too but the AmEx bill has always been the one that has gotten us into trouble. And mind you we had burned through the $6,000 grand in savings (I was saving that for the tax bill on the retirement withdrawal that I knew was coming) and the kids savings had been wiped out too. We had nothing at our disposal except my car. So I had to do something. I hocked my car.
Now in the midst of all this I had made a firm decision in my head to take back control of the finances of our home. And each time I was completely swayed by my wife’s tears and heartfelt sentiment that she could get things back under control if she just had a little more time. Plus she said that she didn’t want to be kept out of the finances again and that when I was doing the money before I would just push her down and not listen to her. So again, I caved. Each time we hit rock bottom I would try to get us back up to a point and still let the situation run. I was scared of my wife’s reaction and feelings.
Let’s come back to here and now shall we? We are just about to move into August. The last time we paid anything to American Express, I come to find out, was April. Our truck payment is behind. Most of my cards are behind a month or more. Some have even gone all the way to collection agencies. I am getting multiple calls daily from various collectors that want to be paid. And, even though I was just told a few weeks ago that our car payments were up to date and that we are good, I also find out this past Saturday that we are overdrawn in our back account by $800.
“What? How could we be negative?” she says. “I was watching that.”
This morning we are up to $1,000 negative in our account. If it gets any worse we will not be able to pay our rent. We are already not going to be able to buy groceries. Our utility bills are mounting because they are months behind and I have a truck payment that is about to get to 60 days late. How much longer should I wait to see if this thing gets better?
Granted things have gotten out of hand in terms of cost all over the place. The economy is crap right now thanks to fuel prices. The cost of gas is driving the cost of everything else up so things that we rely on daily are getting harder and harder to afford. But when it comes right down to it, how would that explain the condition of our expenses?
I blame myself. Sandi should never had been put into a position to handle this. It is my role as the leader of our household to take care of things like this. I have failed her, my family and myself. I have let this get out of control. That gets fixed now.
A man with no balls allows all sorts of mischief to take place right under his nose because he is too damned scared to make a change. Today, I take my balls back. This will be fixed.
Editors note: This post is being posted from the future (August 8 to be exact) because I cannot manage to stay on top of things long enough to post my daily blogaries. I have all of the things that I intend to write about tucked away but for some reason I am not able to keep this thing pushed out every day. That said, forgive me. I will catch up.
Today was my birthday. I am 34 years old as of 5:XX this morning (I totally forgot what time I was born - it was a long time ago - sue me). Today was my day to celebrate me getting another year older, wiser, fatter, tireder and crankier. And I did that for the most part.
A few days my brother called me and asked if I wanted to hit up a baseball game with him. I thought that it would have been really nice to hit up a game with him since I have not done hardly anything with him for a long time. So I asked Sandi if there was anything planned for the day for me. She told me she thought the kids had something planned for the morning. I had already planned an afternoon out with Sandi and I so that pretty much eradicated any chance of me getting brother time with my broski.
It ended up being not all that much of a day of things though. I ended up taking care of my own birthday breakfast (actually lunch because of the time of it). It consisted of leftovers from the previous few days because the kitchen was hellishly nasty and there wasn’t really food in the house to cook anyway. After a very late start to the morning I ended up getting the kids somewhat ready to be babysat by their auntie while Sandi and I went out to lunch and the movies.
Since we had just eaten breakfastlunch a few minutes earlier we didn’t go to lunch opting instead to hit up an earlier timeslot for “The Dark knight”. This movie kicked all kinds of ass. The action was awesome, Heath Ledger kicked crazy butt, Christian Bale kicked all kinds of butt… it was just a cool movie. And while I thought it could have ended about six times before it actually did, I think it ended up well anyway.
After the movie Sandi and I hit up Elephant Bar for dessert. And we talked. A lot. About a lot of different things. But mostly we talked about our identities and how we saw ourselves. I talked a little bit about my recent discovery of what a coward I have been and my quest for manhood that I should have started 20 years ago but am just getting around to now. We talked a little bit about her frustrations in life, in finance and in marriage and parenting. Overall it was kind of a downer conversation to have on a birthday celebration. But it was needed so it was all good.
Then something happened I did not expect. We talked more this evening. A lot more. It went back to our marriage and how much Sandi feels like she has no identity as a woman, as a wife or even as a person. She feels stymied. She feels like she doesn’t know anything and that nothing she has experienced means anything to anyone. She is listless and alone and stuck. I have felt that way before too, and I shared that with her.
What started out to be an evening of fun and fellowship with my family, in the end, turned out to be a pretty regular day. It had a late morning, me handling breakfast/lunch, me setting up the sitter, me deciding the movie, me deciding where to do dessert and me being spoken to on the couch. I can’t really complain about that. There are a lot of men that would have spent their birthdays without their kids, or single, or worse yet, working or in prison or something. So it wasn’t as bad as it might sound. It was just… regular.
At the end of the evening it was just another day. I got to go out on a date. That was nice. I got some dessert. That was nice. I got to spend time with my wife and kids. That was nice. And even though I am perfectly satisfied with how my day turned out I had wished it would have involved a little more of what it did have than it did. But who am I to ask for something on my birthday?
I should have known it would start this way, with the noise and the “I’m hungry” and the “Did not!” and the “Did too!”. Seems as though almost all day-afters are the same. The thing that made this morning a little different I think was the sheer volume of what had to be done today to make today work.
First, and probably the most difficult, thing of the day was actually waking up. After last night just the thought of getting out of bed this morning was daunting. Then the thought of a living room that was beat to hell seemed to add to the stack. Throw in the fact that we needed to leave early this morning for the festivities of the day AND that I had to feed this army of a sleepover and it is easy to see that I was not looking forward to being awake at any point today (except for the fun stuff that is).
After coming to grips with what the day had in store for us I decided it was time to handle the feeding of the flock. And what better way to do that than with some eggs. But how many should I cook for eight girls, my son, my wife and I? This is what I calculated:
2 dozen eggs ought to do it
Yep, you counted right. 24 eggs. Two dozen of them. That is a lot of eggs (don’t be fooled though, we go through 14 just in my family alone). Alas, I even needed to haul out the big bowl to harness all of them things.
2 dozen eggs in a bowl... the big bowl
So I scrambled up those eggs after beating them something fierce and was able to serve up the eggs and toast in just enough time to get us out of the house almost an hour late. Fortunately for us the hour late was made better by the fact that the people that were going to be there when we eventually end up there were also late making the beginning to our festivities better.
Where is there? There is here, the Malibu Grand Prix and Castle. Bekah wanted to drive go carts for her birthday so we hit up the go carts, bumper boats and mini golf for the day. The reason we wanted to be there early was because a group of 25 was scheduled for a party immediately after ours. Like I said though, they were late too so we actually had the track almost entirely to ourselves for the duration of the driving. I was blessed to be able to take my daughter Adriannah on two laps and a friend of my daughter Rebekah’s on two laps (which means I got four laps baby, yeah!).
After the driving was the bumper boating which was a blast. Sandi took Alaynah on the bumper boats and had great big water battles with all of the other kids. She was soaked, they were soaked, it was a big old soakfest. Which was good because the sun was starting to peak and it was getting hot. Not to mention that fact that were about to embark on hitting the greens with eleven of us, count it, eleven of us playing.
Golf did not go as well as the rest of the day did. It was nice that we made it through about five holes, after which kids started dropping off like flies. By the sixteenth we had five playing and Alaynah wasn’t even hitting her ball anymore, she was walking it up to the hole and dropping it in. It was hot, there was no shade and we had killed all of our water by the fourth hole. Crap.
The nice thing though was that we hit the arcade soon after that. The arcade is air conditioned and for the most part devoid of life as we know it. We were the only people on the place for a while until a few other people decided to crash the joint. By then though we were out of tokens and just basically playing on the various sit down games. Not playing the games, playing on them.
We managed to leave the place after only about four hours which was truly just about all I could stand of it. It was hot, I was tired and the kids were cranky from not sleeping enough last night. At the end of the day (the play day that is) we all needed a little R&R. Which is what we are having. Right now.
Tonight marks the night my daughter Rebekah will be celebrating her 11th birthday. It is a little late, but scheduling circumstances outside of my control necessitated this weekend be the weekend we do this.
What that means to be is that tonight I will be flooded with young girls eating, playing, screaming, eating, screaming and screaming. I already know that it is going to be loud. And that I am going to get eaten out of house and home. And that I am going to get very little sleep. I am prepared for that. I think what I am not prepared for, and what I truly do not know how to prepare for, is the physical impact this will have on me and my wife.
Of course, knowing me, I am going to throw myself headlong into the festivities. I always do. And I will probably end up setting up games or something fun for the kids and see to it that they stay up too late. That just seems to me to be something that I am drawn to. So I am rather looking forward to having some fun tonight.
I guess I am just not looking forward to the noise, the food bill, the noise and the noise. But with a house full of girls, should I really expect anything less?