Ramblings of a Technology Nut

Admin's Night Before Christmas
Author unknown


"T'is the night before Christmas" I thought with a frown,
I was stuck at the office. The network was down.
The routers were hung in the closet. All crashed.
Their tables had holes in the data. All trashed.
And remote distribution, it seems, just for fun,
Had erased DLLs Windows needed to run
On 84 desktops way down in accounting.
I sat stunned at my desk, my blood pressure mounting.

When all of a sudden there arose such a clatter,
I saw that our server had something the matter.
There was smoke coming out from the main hard disk drive.
"No Problem," I thought. "I'm all set with RAID 5."
But I discovered the system I'd thought was unstoppable,
Well its fancy disk drives were completely unswappable!
"No problem," I thought, "I've tape backup to thank."
And then I discovered my backups were blank.

The UPS burped, the lights all went out.
I started to scream, I started to shout
But nobody heard as I vented my rage.
My gurus were all on vacation those days.
And nobody's tech support answered the phone.
I was nose deep in trouble, completely alone.
When out at reception, I heard a soft knock.
As the hands touched midnight on my desktop clock...

"What's your problem?" he asked.
"Never mind, friend, I know.
I checked out your network five hours ago.
I did some proactive analysis, so
I knew this time bomb was going to blow."
Who was this guy? Who did he think he was?
He was dressed in red coveralls, white beard, black gloves.
His eyes had the twinkle of technical genius.
His warm smile cut down the distance between us.

He spread out his tools, and went straight to his work.
"Who designed this connection? Must be a jerk,"
He said with a :-)> as he quickly rebooted,
Uploaded some software, and smoothly rerouted
The LAN to a WAN that he quickly supplied
With a bandwidth at least 20 gigabits wide!
T'was wireless to bypass the Telco's fat toll.
And tech support? Elves, working at the North Pole.

"Now bridging, now routing, now Ethernet hubs!"
He chanted as each piece of hardware he rubbed.
"Cheer up, my good friend! Lose that mindset so tragic!
Technology often looks just like some magic
To people who don't understand what we do.
Now a switch, emulation, now middleware glue!
Look at the protocols, check one or two,
Debug a bit, test a bit, presto! We're through!"

My data was back! Every system checked out!
Tears of joy wet my face as I wandered about.
"How can I thank you? You must be Saint Nick!"
He said, "Really, my friend, it's not such a great trick,
If you don't give up hope, focus on what you're doing,
And read all your issues of NETWORK COMPUTING."
And I heard him exclaim, as his reindeer were coursing,
"Merry Christmas to all! Consider us for outsourcing!"

Best wishes to everyone throughout this holiday season!
Enjoy your time with friends and family.