Saturdays are supposed to be my low key days at work. I expected to have a slow day of flight following the Ultras/Encores and XLS fleet, when by 8:30AM our systems crashed. Every. Single. Fucking. Form. Of. Communication. Ceased. To. Exist. Everything except for the phones... which were ringing off the hook due to pilots calling in asking why they are unable to update anything on their blackberries.
(side note: our pilots' main tool of communication with us is their blackberry, aka their pager. Their pager is where we send them their daily briefings, which essentially tells them what they are doing for the rest of the day, any ASAP changes like new recovery trips, and next day briefings. They also use their pager to check-in for duty, place crew food orders, log flight times and fuel uploads, etc.)
So, 8:30am the systems crashed. We were unable to access the software we use to view the entire fleet timeline (called IJET). The timeline stores every single piece of information that pilots need to be able to work that day. In IJET, we are able to view their current briefings, meal orders, hotel information, airline information, when their duty starts/ends, etc. Well, the systems were down until 12:30pm. That was 4 hours of scrambling on the phones, taking calls from pilots who ranged from being totally understanding and sympathetic, to guys who would get irritated and pissed off at us as to why we are unable to look up something as simple as a crew food order number.
"Are you fucking serious?" is what I wanted to say to those guys. Our asses were slammed and we were all essentially working blind, and all these guys cared about was food.
It's amazing how quickly technology can bone you. We ended up logging every single phone call by hand on pieces of paper, and once the systems came back up we had to enter all the information into it. Such info included what time they called to check-in for duty, logging their flight times, and updating their briefings with new, correct info. All in all... it was one hell of a Saturday.
(And those margaritas and redbull/vodkas I drank that night? Well, I totally deserved those!)
(And... on that note... lounging around in bed all day with X was totally what I deserved today, too!)
Apr 19, 2009
Technology Bites Back
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6 comments:
It sounds very very tense. And it's those kind of scenarios that make me nervous about relying so heavily on technology (which I still do), but....I must update my 3-ring binder address book!! Glad you survived and are have a kick-back day!
What a nightmare! Technology can be such a blessing, but when it doesn't work right - especially when there's no warning - it's a curse. I'm glad it's up and running again.
That's the one thing I hated about working in the NetJets IT Dept. I was basically on-call 24/7/365. I don't think we ever had an outage like that, thought! IntelliJet would go down every now and then, but it was usually just an easily-fixed network problem. Those always happened in the middle of the night, of course.
The pilots didn't have Blackberry's back then (we didn't even have cell phones - I had to carry a pager) so everything was done by phone and fax. It was a much smaller fleet back then, too, so it was easier to manage.
Hey laying in bed all day is just as exhausting as work. Well almost...
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