Ghost Town

It would appear I'm the only one on my team in the office this morning. We did a big, nasty upgrade to our system over the weekend. Or I should really say "they". I'm not a technical person, so there wasn't much I could do

Our system was supposed to be online by start of business this morning. We made it, but only with about three hours to spare. The original schedule was to be done by noon yesterday.

IT is an odd business. It seems we're always dealing with complex systems that we don't fully understand and can't predict. We give optimistic estimates, then kill ourselves to beat the deadline.

Part of the problem is the nature of business. We simply can't be without important systems for more than couple days. We were already soliciting grumbles when we took the system down on a Thursday. If we'd asked for a few more days to make sure we did it all right we'd have been lynched. If we'd not have made the deadline this morning we'd have been lynched. And if we'd decided to bail out and go back to the old system it would be a month at the earliest before we'd get another chance.

So...here I sit like a nerd in the wilderness, waiting for the others to come. And praying nothing major goes wrong this morning before everyone else regains consciousness.