Fixing an Emergency from the Parking Lot
IAD airport car rental - Wed, 24 Apr 2019, 9:30am
A second crazy thing happened this morning, all before 9:30am. No, I didn't see a second person wearing my wedding ring. It was a bit of work craziness.
As I was walking out to my car at the car rental lot I got an urgent message from my boss. Nobody in the company could access a training video I produced. As everyone up to the CEO had told people to watch the video, fixing the problem was urgent.
I sat down in my new rental car, opened my work laptop, and tethered to the network from my phone. The network was slow from way out in the rental lots. As I began troubleshooting the problem in Google Drive it was unclear which pointlessly cute "Oops, something didn't work" type messages (thanks, Google 😡) were caused by timeouts and which were permissions errors. Ultimately I determined that someone had bunged up the permissions on my file so that nobody else could access it, including me.
I messaged the sysadmins who could override the permissions and reset them. As it was unclear how soon those individuals would respond (they're in another country) and this problem already had executive level attention, I decided the most expedient fix would be to upload a fresh copy of the video and publish a new link to it. I began uploading... which went slowly. "4 minutes," the app told me. Then 5. Then 6. Soon 10, 12, 16, 20....
"I'm working from a parking lot at the airport," I explained to my team via chat. "I'm going to try driving somewhere else to see if bandwidth improves."
I drove about a mile away to a gas station with a big parking lot. It's where a lot of limo drivers hang out outside the airport. Coincidentally, the cell signal there is a lot better. The upload finished by the time I parked.
"Problem solved," I slack'd my colleagues. "I'm going back to my day off visiting family."
Next entry: A Day with Family
A second crazy thing happened this morning, all before 9:30am. No, I didn't see a second person wearing my wedding ring. It was a bit of work craziness.
As I was walking out to my car at the car rental lot I got an urgent message from my boss. Nobody in the company could access a training video I produced. As everyone up to the CEO had told people to watch the video, fixing the problem was urgent.
I sat down in my new rental car, opened my work laptop, and tethered to the network from my phone. The network was slow from way out in the rental lots. As I began troubleshooting the problem in Google Drive it was unclear which pointlessly cute "Oops, something didn't work" type messages (thanks, Google 😡) were caused by timeouts and which were permissions errors. Ultimately I determined that someone had bunged up the permissions on my file so that nobody else could access it, including me.
I messaged the sysadmins who could override the permissions and reset them. As it was unclear how soon those individuals would respond (they're in another country) and this problem already had executive level attention, I decided the most expedient fix would be to upload a fresh copy of the video and publish a new link to it. I began uploading... which went slowly. "4 minutes," the app told me. Then 5. Then 6. Soon 10, 12, 16, 20....
"I'm working from a parking lot at the airport," I explained to my team via chat. "I'm going to try driving somewhere else to see if bandwidth improves."
I drove about a mile away to a gas station with a big parking lot. It's where a lot of limo drivers hang out outside the airport. Coincidentally, the cell signal there is a lot better. The upload finished by the time I parked.
"Problem solved," I slack'd my colleagues. "I'm going back to my day off visiting family."
Next entry: A Day with Family