Murphys Law

The immediacy,the insanity, the exhileration, the horror, the moral dilemma....No I'm not talking about the America's most surreal and nightmarish military campaign in Vietnam, neither am I talking about the plight of the ideal Hindustani bahu in an Ekta Kapoor soap on Star TV who periodically breaks into mournful lamentations on learning that one of her ex-husbands is going out with her one of her step sisters.Its this thing which happened last friday at our firm which I'm blowing out of proportions to make it look more menacing..I aint the hero...Just the protoganist...A la Benhur...Here goes...

It was midnight...Ripples of electricity lunged through the telephone cables.....and BANG.....sethigs mobile played its blaring ringtone...A feature of the mobile phones which is not usually appreciated at such an unearthly hour.And I declared with utmost coercion ...Our workflow system in the head office is down....Bang!! Bang!!Bang!!I didnt want a mission..and for my sins they handed me one... A volvo bus was on its way to Nellore.Travelling in it was a man who was the master of a product of which everybody in the firm became a slave..unreachable through his mobile..Krovi and Yuga were crashing after attending the first day sessions of Sun Tech Days...dreaming,sleeping,sleeping,dreaming..Probably rehearsing some out of the ordinary act which they might be asked to perform on stage....And bang....I deprived them of a piece of peace or perhaps maybe a peace of piece...

The system which these guys had built started throwing exceptions.And people in the head office went frenzy over it...'Mai iske binaa jee nahee saktaa, jee nahee saktaa, jee nahee saktaa' Sounds like a dialogue from a typical hindi flick in the nineties right? ...And hence I had to call the folks who actually built it who were attending a tech fest at Bangalore....they asked me to look at the logs which i sincerely did...Unfortunately I couldnt make much sense out of it..KILL! they said..I felt like a class twelfth class student being asked to make sense out of Shrodingers equation..Apparently the process was utilizing 98% of the cpu and could crash anytime now....But then, It slowly started coming back to normal...lower...down....down...and it finally became normal...I sat for more time monitoring the cpu utilization...And then went home...But it didnt end here...How could it ? A sum of the remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to programming which despite our sincerest efforts could not be eliminated from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision(with due apologies to The Architect). An intangible malaise was lurking just around the corner...Waiting to attack once again...

The clock started running...tick tock tick tock..things ran smoothly for the rest of the day there... The next day my PL kept calling me every five minutes...literally...And there I was sitting at my desk, reading the logs, monitoring the cpu and reporting ..The problem would have to be debugged before the trading starts in the head office...Krovi was asked to fly down to Hyderabad in the earliest flight..Apparently, the flight got cancelled and our man was subjected to 'Bhrastachar' on zee cinema at the Airport...Murphys law was in full swing..tick tock..The sounds of seconds passing on...An approaching inevitable daylight at our head office..Very soon the trading day would begin...And at when the clock struck 8:00 at nyc, the problem started reappearing once again..People started throwing in "Mai iske binaa jee nahee saktaa' mails..I started running to and fro. between the systems room and my desk..demonstrating my athletic skills...Later that night the football coordinator here asked me if I would be willing to play a game the next day...heh heh...Well anyways after my collegues pin pointed the problem as being located in the database, the DBA was asked to takeover.Fortunately a deadlock was located in the backend db which was later killed and things came back to normal...I heaved a sigh of relief...And after the deranged influence of that frenzied episode,I relinquished my hold on my usual self....u know what i mean...adios