Quote:
Originally Posted by Oldmadham
Quote:
Originally Posted by G6Tanuki
{3} Don't crack under pressure: when you've got a major service/piece of equipment down and customers/senior-manager-types/CEOs are continually asking how much longer it will take before normal service is resumed, tell them - politely - that their continual interruptions are actually delaying you from fixing their problem and that it'll be fixed much quicker if they just leave you to get on with it. "When I'm giving you a progress-report I'm not working on the problem!".
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This becomes much harder at a TV Station, with various Production type people wailing for, either that monitor back, or a replacement, so you spend half your time "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul", knowing that "Peter" will probably be moaning for his monitor tomorrow!
In the meantime, you try to get on with the problem. |
My IT-consultancy gigs included quite a few financial institutions - a 'Production-type wailing" can't be anything like as threatening as the CTO of one of the UK's largest insurance/pensions institutions berating you and telling you just how many millions of pounds of trade they're losing per hour because - as it turns out - 'someone' in their internal finance-department forgot to release the funds to renew their domain-registration [despite my reminding them repeatedly in the preceeding three months] so their customer-facing website/email was down.
To achieve peace I renewed the registration using my personal credit-card and 'normality' was restored - but in the process the domain-ownership also 'conveniently' got transferred into my name...
Another time, a customer had a load of promotuional literature, TV/radio advertising, magazine/newspaper-inserts/flyers printed, website-design/back-end infrastructure and hosting provisioned and scheduled a major campaign to begin in a few days time.
At which point I reminded them that they'd not actually registered the domain in their name.
Cue much panic! Bow-tie-wearing advertising-types running around like headless chickens. Again, I registered the domain in my name, pointed it at my servers-on-three-continents-DNS, and saved their day (they shivered when they saw my invoice, but paid-up nonetheless).