The Nightmare Week

So the last two days have been… hellish. WARNING: this is a non-sexy story, so if you were looking for some light one-handed reading, that post probably isn’t for you.

Two days ago (feels like a week, now that it’s over), we had this very intense project that needed to be delivered to the printer. My little team was handling the editing part and it was coming down to the wire–the kind of wire that is measured in hours, sometimes minutes, and requires go/no-go calls around midnight (it involved some international partners). My group was to do some last-minute reviews of the final copies and, if we found anything, send the edits immediately. Turns out we found some edits that had been marked but not pushed to the layout people for 16 hours, which jeopardized our place in the printing queue. I’ll spare you the details, but as the lead of my group, I had to take the flak for it. It was an amateurish mistake and it’s the kind of stuff that could have jeopardized our street date (and led to some job terminations).

Welcome to the publishing world…

So that was Wednesday night. I got home around 1:30AM, didn’t fall asleep until 2AM. I get up yesterday morning and head out to work. Just as I step out of my apartment, I notice my bike wasn’t in its usual place. Heck, it wasn’t in its place at all–it had been stolen. The wire was right there, on the ground, my bike gone. And the previous night had been so bad that my reaction was just… “Meh. Whatever.” I head out to the bus stop. It starts raining. I don’t have my umbrella, so I get soaking wet. I get to the office. My access card is busted, so I can’t get in. To make matters worse, there’s no one at the reception. I look for my phone–I don’t have it. Turns out I forgot it at work the night before. In desperation, I send an email to the IT group, hoping that someone will come get me. (My iPad saved my life! Yay Steve Jobs! 🙂 )

You’d think that alone would be enough, but noOOoo… Last night, I go out for dinner and drinks with some friends. I hear the ping of an email come in and check–just in case something else went wrong. And yeah, sure enough, something did: my site is down and the notice is from the advertisement system telling me my ad has been deactivated because the site is broken. I can’t deal with that during dinner, so I have to wait late at night (stressed out) until I can come home and contact the hosting service. I’m answered (through chat) by a nice enough IT technician located in India (yeah, you know where this is going, right?). I explain that I’ve done nothing to the site, it just stopped working without warning. He gives me a ticket number and says he’ll escalate the issue. He also says it will take at LEAST 60 minutes before someone handles this.

I wait and wait, and around midnight, I get an email from the hosting service–signed by the exact same person I chatted with a few hours earlier. Did he escalate the issue to… himself?! He asks me the exact same questions as before and I give him the exact same answers. Another 2 hours later, someone else tells me this is being further escalated, and this morning, there was an email saying they had identified the problem and were working on it. And just now, it finally got resolved. Everything is now back to normal, everyone, sorry for the downtime.

As a side note, if I didn’t know better, I would think this is faerie mischief…

–Jaycee
“I’m doing it.”