Passover Entry
Friday was a complete nightmare of a day. In addition to nursing an unpleasant hangover, I ended up being stuck in one of the weirdest situations I had ever been in.
I had installed four circuits in a location on Wednesday. All four were put on a brand new shelf in the mux¹. Two were turned up that day while the other two had to be returned to the central office for more work. The latter two jobs came out, and upon arrival at the site, I found that the shelf had been removed.
It turns out that engineering had two separate plans for that location, one involved adding the shelf to the existing mux, the other was to install a new mux. According to their records, there weren't any circuits in the new shelf, so they thought they were clear to remove it. Meanwhile, in addition to the four circuits I had put in, another four were scheduled to go in on those facilities. Those four came out as field dispatches on Friday.
So, in addition to taking out two working circuits, by having removed the shelf, high tech made the two pending circuits and the four new ones impossible to install. And, of course, the whole reason for putting in the new shelf was because there weren't many available facilities in that basement in the first place.
To make matters worse, the four new jobs was given to another tech, who wasn't quite as good at reading their documentation as they should have been, which caused them to take some customers out of service. And if that wasn't enough, some of the jobs had been redesigned between Wednesday and Friday, meaning that the old wiring was no longer valid in several cases.
The ultimate solution was to get high tech back out there to re-install the shelf, convince the other tech that they should just leave well enough alone (I had my manager's help with that) and take the resultant trouble ticket she generated myself to unfuck the myriad of problems as best as possible.
I ended up saving the day, but it was extremely stressful in the interim (and dirty as well, I really had to take a shower when I got home). It is just not often that you find the analogy of a rug pulled out from under your feet being so literal.
Saturday, on the other hand, turned out rather well for the most part. As I've often commented, Passover is my favorite holiday, and I was quite sated by its conclusion. The irony of having a main course of filet mignon² for a Jewish holiday was quite amusing. It did, however, make it quite clear that I will have to again make the chain (morer horseradish) for next year as the store-bought stuff is just plain lame. I made it last year and was quite proud of the results.
...and a happy 4/20, of course.
¹ Fiberoptic multiplexer; that's what turns the light into an electrical signal that we can put on copper and bring up to the customer's premises.
² For some reason, filet mignon is not a Kosher cut of beef, exacerbated in this situation by the sour cream-based horseradish sauce that went on it.