No Rocket Scientists Here Today

I don't mind answering questions. Really. Even the ones that are less than, shall we stay, "stellar". I know that we are all at different technical levels; some higher, some ah... lower. Questions are and always will be a part of the type of job I do. But there are some aspects of this that could either drive me to heavy drinking or an assault and battery charge.

Late this afternoon our production system failed due to a hardware issue on a server. We were not the only application affected and the Sysadmin folks got right on it and resolved it very quickly; no complaints. However, when this situation occurred, the business user contact (whom I have talked about before; same questions how many times?!!) send me her typical is production down (duh? Are you getting an error message?? Yes? Then guess what; it's down.) email. If that wasn't bad enough, this person continues to attach HUGE bmp image (screen shot) attachment. This time it was 5,000 + kb and managed to hang my email client until I was able to delete it. Then the user whined via IM that it was taking me too long to answer the email. I asked again that if an image attachment was going to be sent, please use something smaller like a jpg or gif. I offered to explain how, but I got the brush off with "I'll try next time". Gee, thanks for all the help from your side. I am getting close to setting up a filter to route messages with huge attachments to never-nerver land.

Once we got passed that and I saw what was happening, I realized that we were having a real issue, and not the typical "I think the application is running slow" problem. I tried to open a trouble ticket but the ticket system was having the same problem. I emailed out team and let everybody know what was going on. I told everyone that unless they had a phone number to call to report the problem, there was not much I could do. I figured that the sysadmin team knew about the problem and was working. In addition, I contacted my DBA (I thought it was a DB issue) to see if they could find anything out. While this was going on the business user continued to ask me what I was doing to fix the problem; as I have told her before I neither have access to the machines to do server trouble shooting nor am I as qualified as the Sysadmin folks. Even after explaining this face to face on my last trip they still don't get it. I keep hearing "You are the technical support person, you need to fix it." and I keep saying, "I am the application support person, if the application has a problem, I the go to guy. But if it's a server issue, it's out of my hands." I am sure I am going to hear more about this tomorrow; it will really make my day.... NOT.