On a vaguely related but more depressing subject, the company I work for is experiencing major pains because of a database outage caused by a simple mistake by the dev team (not me, fortunately). I spent 6 hours last night working with our system architect, trying to piece Humpty Dumpty back together, at which point we finally got it stable enough to go to bed.
I didn't realize at the time that that was the last time I'd talk to him.
Today, when I got up, I went to work expecting a fecal storm of legendary proportions. And I got one. I spent all day on conference calls with the higher ups trying to work out a plan to fix everything using cached copies of data scattered across 280 other servers. I kept waiting for the architect to get on, and people were getting antsy and mad that he was dodging them. It wouldn't be the first time, but he has terrible sleeping habits so I just brushed it off.
But time wore on, and the system architect wasn't averse to missing sleep because of a massive outage. I got more worried as 2 PM rolled around and he still wasn't around.
Then the president pulled me aside and told me that the architect's parents found him dead this morning in his home, probably from a heart attack. He'd known the guy for 18 years, and I'd known him for 10. We worked together closely for that time, and it's no exaggeration to say that the company's technical infrastructure was built by him. No single monkey runs the show, but he came as close as anyone could.
So, now the company is going to have to pick up the pieces of this data loss without him, and on top we're going to have to figure out how to reverse engineer everything he built and never documented or explained to anyone.
He was a recluse and worked almost exclusively from home, so we've been worried this would happen for a while. He's had one heart attack before, but that happened in the office so some literal boyscouts performed CPR until EMS arrived, and he recovered from that.
He didn't really have much in the way of friends, but we were on very good terms at work, and I think I'm one of the few people he really trusted with a lot of technical things.
The worst part though, is that I'll never forget that I was the last one who talked to him. And during that call, he mentioned that he "Must be getting old because I'd normally be at my prime at midnight but can barely go" and that he had to take a break at one point because of stabbing pain in his side. I brushed it off since he's had back problems, and it was a stressful night. But when I mentioned I was having tension pains too, he joked, "This is going to kill both of us, isn't it?"
He had no idea.
I had no idea.
The guy who caused the outage is handling it much less well though, since he blames himself for keeping him up late and working on the problem...
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9745804 times)