|
Ken Ortiz
Hello all and Happy Holidays!
I hope you enjoy this Christmas story:
In my post #814, I mentioned that I spent several years as an On-Call Technical Resource (OCTR), being one of the “go to" guys when there were problems/issues with our system deployments at customer locations. During that period of time, I received several “atta-boys" from customers or our regional teams for a job well done and they were usually in the form of a memo or verbal praise to my management. But there was one “atta-boy" that was so very unique, and so very touching and one that I will always remember because my younger daughter (who was an infant at the time), played a major part in it. It also relates to Christmas because it occurred in December and....well....you will see.
Not sure it would qualify as a Hallmark holiday movie, but if it did, I would name it “The Holiday Diaper Caper".
It was December 1996 and I was practically a single dad at that time, raising an 8 year old daughter and an infant daughter (born late February 1996). Before this period of time, I was actively involved with personally travelling to customer sites and performing system upgrades and implementations. I was also one of the experts in these unique procedures we developed, and would be on-call to assist other team members out in the field. But because I needed to be home to raise my daughters, I took on the role of training our regional field engineers on these procedures in our lab, allowing them to take on the roles of traveling to customer locations to perform these upgrades, while I was their back-up resource. So during that time, I had my very own (well....company provided) Skypager and cellphone and I needed to have them with me 24/7.
In early December, Glenn, a regional engineer from our Southeast region came to our facility to be trained on the upgrade procedures that he was to perform on our customer’s Raleigh cellular system. This was a pretty major upgrade as that system was their gateway to their other networks and needed this upgrade (hardware and software) by the end of the year because they were about to reach their capacity limit. What made our procedures unique and also very important to our customers was that we were able to do a “pre-build" of the customer system in our lab, and essentially do a “hot cut" on site to minimize their downtime. As Glenn was pretty familiar with our equipment and has worked on previous upgrades, he was well qualified to learn these new procedures. So I mentored Glenn in our lab and we pre-built and tested the upgraded Raleigh network in our lab, based on information the customer sent us. Then Glenn flew out to the customer site with the pre-built load (disk drives) and the cutover was set for Saturday night (actually about 2am Sunday), mid-December. I was home alone with my daughters that weekend as my ex (she wasn't my ex yet) was away, but I had my on-call work flip phone (Motorola Micro-tac) and Skypager (known as the Barbie laptop) on me just in case. I talked to Glenn about midnight that Saturday night, touching base and going through the pre-cut checklist and all was a go for a 2am cutover. Then I went to sleep (my daughters were already asleep) soon after.
About 6:30am Sunday morning I get a call (waking me up of course) on my work cell phone, and I am not worried as I assume it's Glenn calling to let me know that it all went well, because if there was an issue, I would have gotten called or paged way before that. So I answer the phone and lo and behold, I get put on this conference call with a horde of heavy hitters (customer on-site engineer and his manager, Glenn and his regional manager, the Motorola support center engineer, and my manager among others). The issue was that the upgrade and cutover went fine, but since about 3am, they have not been able to get the links up to the rest of their networks and now they are discussing last resorts before having to back out this upgrade, which would be disastrous. Why was I not called earlier? Because our portion was supposedly successful and they had assumed there was another issue. So as I am on the phone listening to their discussions, my infant daughter starts crying as she had woke up and probably needs her diaper changed. So I go to get her from her crib, with the phone on my ear and of course, everybody on the conference call can hear her crying. So one of the managers (I believe it was the Customer manager) says “Is that a baby crying?”. I said “Yes, I am at home and my Daughter woke up and needs a diaper change”. So as I am getting everything ready to change her (wipes, diapers, powder, etc), I start asking Glenn about what kind of error messages he is seeing on the screen (I still have the phone on my ear). So as he is telling me what he is seeing, I am working on changing a fussy and upset baby and of course, she had a diaper explosion and it is not pretty. And I am sure the people on the conference call must have gotten wind that I am struggling with this diaper change. So I ask Glenn what gateway equipment the Customer is using because I have seen this type of error before. Well, the on-site customer engineer says this product, but his manager says a different product. So what happened was that the on-site customer engineer changed that product, but did not inform us or his manager about it. So I tell everybody (while I am changing a messy diaper with a restless and a noisy infant) that there is a way to incorporate this change in manually and I walk Glenn through the steps. So Glenn does this and then I tell him to go ahead and try to bring the links up. As this takes several minutes, there is dead silence (my daughter has a new diaper and has her bottle and is content), and everybody else is holding their breath. (you can cut the tension with a knife is a typical cliché) Then just like a typical movie scene, the customer manager says “So how old is your daughter?”, and I reply “About 9 months" then everybody starts cracking up and the tension releases and then Glenn says “The links are up! The system is talking to the network!” and everybody gives a cheer. So then I drop off the conference call as Glenn and the others can finish up.
So on Monday, I meet with my manager (who was one of those on the conference call, and who has a serious southern accent) and give him the full rundown (with acronyms of course like post #814). Here is what he replied to me: “Son, I have seen many things in my 25 plus years here, but this is the first time I have ever heard of an engineer bringing back a system from the dead while changing a diaper!” And for the next several days at work, I was known as the “Diaper man". My group members (and others who got wind of that) sure had fun with that one for awhile.
A few days before our Christmas holiday, my department head calls me into his office and I see my manager there and a couple of other department managers and he tells me that he had gotten some feedback from Glenn, his regional team manager and the Customer manager and they expressed their appreciation for what I did to bring their system back up and also doing it under such duress. So what was my atta-boy for that? They had sent me a big box of Pampers and a big box of Huggies diapers! I was so touched (and amused) and that was the most meaningful “atta-boy" award I ever got during my time as an “OCTR - On Call Technical Resource".
What a memorable Christmas 1996 that was and my infant daughter played a huge part of it, even though she was not aware of it at that time. But, for this Christmas, I am going to show her this post as she has never heard/seen this story before.
|
.jpg)
Thanks again for your attention to this monument! 
