Want an adventure - work as a field engineer

The last time I wrote, how our work is arranged, and now I will tell different stories. For example, about how the server for 3 million American dollars remained under the snow, how our admin was forgotten in the server room, and how the bag of potatoes is fundamentally different from the blade servers.

Therefore, again, take tea, I will again talk about what happens in a country with a harsh (and therefore often with fun) reality.
')
Distant Siberian city. Somehow the company bought a server from there, and we had to install and configure it. A wagon arrives, a rack weighing 2 tons is carefully taken out of it, placed in front of the entrance. Now the loaders hired by the customer must drive up and transfer it to the server room. And the movers are late. It starts to snow. Server for 3 million dollars alone is in the yard. No, of course, it was covered with film, but the fact already pleases. Further more fun. The building is Soviet, there is no freight elevator. On the right floor, the overlap in the server room will calmly hold the new rack, but on the way two floors - no. There is a ceiling of one and a half tons maximum, which became clear only after the fact.

What to do? We decided to bring through the window. The procedure is this: you go out into the street, you see a tap, you catch him, you offer him money, he does not agree. You offer him more money - the crane agrees. Still need to disassemble the window. Also quite an interesting IT task.

Magadan movers. Everything is extremely simple and short. Movers throughout his adult life did not unload anything except potatoes. And then the nezhdanchik - server.

You need to explain at least ten times what it is and how serious it is. And not only in the management company, but also to get through to the movers themselves and make sure that the information is received correctly. Otherwise it will be so that some of the disks will arrive dead.

Here's another situation: tomorrow fly to the installation of equipment in the new server. Then one of the contracting parties of the customer who is in charge of the building calls, and says that he has a recourse in his warehouse, he does not have the necessary model of the door - they say, do not worry, right? It is clear that you cannot leave equipment without protection (when you are still in the office you are carrying a unit for half a million dollars from the sixth floor to the first arm, this leads to interesting thoughts). Well and, most likely, when mounting the door there will be a lot of dust and abrasives that exactly suction cooling systems.

Or you come to the place, and the cable of one type, and the module - another. Or, for example, not those cables, or did not reach, or they were flooded with something and you need to order new ones. In this case, an additional engineer is promptly sent with the necessary cables in the backpack, so as not to disrupt the deadlines. Or there were cases when they bought right on the spot, because it is so much faster at times.

Sometimes the airport does not come, because the weather conditions do not allow. And it seems you left for one day for installation, and stay for a week. Or if we negotiate with the customer's IT team so that a server with Winda and something else will be prepared for our arrival, then in fact this does not mean that when the engineer arrives there, Winda will most likely be flooded with it or will begin to fill in at the moment when the engineer appears on the threshold, or there will be some settings crookedly affixed. The engineer will have to demolish everything and do everything with his own hands.

How to write technical specifications - this is a special story. It happens that one thing is written on paper, but in fact the engineer arrives, and it turns out that the cluster settings should be fundamentally different. From a legal point of view, we will do everything and leave, but the system simply will not work for them.

Or there is a contract, it is signed, and the director changes here. And he says: "So, cool, but what is written here, I don’t need nafig, do something else with this money." Once it was that a large project for a bank was ordered from us, and then Oracle fell from them (no one followed the support period), and instead of the planned work we were engaged in billing rescue.

Safeguards sometimes ignite. Once it was necessary to show a large customer a presentation of the solution, and the security men told me: “Pass the laptop”. - "I can not, I have a presentation there." - "Does not care. The laptop is supposed to pass. - “Then why did I come?” - “I don't care. Hand over. As a result, the IT director of a large company was forced to bring his laptop, connected, and transferred files. As a result, it was probably spent about three hours. The main person in the building is the janitor. "Not allowed. Goodbye".

It so happens that the customer sits on the third and fifth, and on the fourth floor there is some other company. And you come to pull the optics, one thread unhappy, and you guerrillas from the fourth floor say: “No, no way. Impossible. If you want, drill a hole in the window and let it go down the street. We won't let us into our closet. ” And here, too, begin dancing, running around and so on.

Or another case. You come to the place, call the person in charge of the customer, and that one: “Oh, and I forgot that the installation, I have been on vacation since yesterday.”

There was a trip to the branches of one company. In one of the cities, an applied woman was bitten by a dog. And since he didn’t take her with him to the doctors, he had to be inoculated against rabies. And in each new region I had to first look for a clinic where an injection could be made, and then go to the installation.

Our engineer was somehow forgotten in the server room on Friday night. Just all the local people left, and that’s all. And there is a basement, the phone does not take. So our engineer was sitting there until the watchman during the detour heard that he was breaking through the door.

There was a different story with the same colleague - there was work on March 8. And there in the office they drank and drank a lot. And one person from the customer’s side confused the jackets and the colleagues left in the jacket, where there were tickets, money, a passport. Only by the evening of the next day I was able to bring it back. And my colleague had to postpone the trip back and had to “watch the sights” in someone else’s jacket for two extra days.

It was a few stories that first came to mind after the previous post . Here and here we have our adventures.