Pressure makes me do dumb things.
Yesterday was a big day here at the Lab. We had high muckity mucks from around the country in to preview a new application and collaborate with the designers. I’ve only been here since last June and hadn’t been through the… uhmmm – the furor of getting ready for one of these meetings. People get really tense and everyone feels the pressure. Even calm, relaxed system administrators. (who?)
Since I’m the sysadmin, I was tasked with setting up the fifteen systems to be used in the demo and discussions – I did it, but had some trouble at one point and called loudly for help. I didn’t hear anything for a long time, went looking, found nearly everyone had gone home and so I resolved to go home to visit my family before I went back later to finish up. I called the woman managing the conference to ask when it would start in the morning and wondered if there was any flexibility in the schedule. There wasn’t so I let her know I’d be heading back in later in the evening.
So, quite a few key people knew at about 6:00 PM that I hadn’t gotten the systems ready yet and needed some help. Apparently, no everyone got the word that I’d be going back in later to work on the systems.
So, I went in at 9:00, figured out the problem by 9:15 (with some clues from colleagues) and by 9:30 was well on my way to finishing up. A colleague came in to help with the repetitive work and we eventually got the systems working, tested and ready.
But then, and here’s the boneheadedness, we just went home. Nope, I didn’t email the staff list, I didn’t call the coordinator or the presenter or our admin or anyone. I didn’t tell anyone that the trouble was resolved and the systems were ready.
So, in come the rest of the staff at 8:05 in the morning having last heard that the machines weren’t ready and that I’d just gone home and left it all broken. To their credit, no-one paniced – they just showed up ready to move very quickly. Good thing, too, because there had been changes to the program over night and out boss made a few last minutes adjustments to the setups (and one last few seconds change) and we four were all scrambling as it was. Very efficiently scrambling, but scrambling.
Lesson learned:
Somehow, anyhow, always remember to communicate your successes as well as your failures and KEEP YOUR TEAM IN THE LOOP!