Last Friday, I got handed the on-call pager by surprise. I thought I was off the on-call rotation, but I hadn't been taken off the list yet. Oh well. It was either take the on call pager, or call abiku into the office for a surprise on-call week. I didn't want to do the latter, and on-call's usually pretty quiet, so I took the pager.
Unfortunately, the on-call gods also thought it was abiku's week, so I got what they had prepared for him. As in 5 drives failing within 8 hours on a RAID device. Everybody says a double drive failure is a rare occurence. Maybe if they said it some more, the disks would agree...
So after spending all night in the office, on and off the phone to the RAID vendor's tech support to see if they had any tricks to get the data back, writing off the data (at least temporarily), and getting back home at about 7:00am, getting some sleep, and then going about a rather pleasant (if delayed) labor day, I blew my keg of barleywine. All those barleywine nights added up to about 5 gallons, apparently. Now I really need to brew more, since I'm down to a half-case of my 2003 vintage now. My boss encouraged me to take an unofficial "comp day" for the work I did during the outage, so I may take that as an opportunity to brew a replacement. For now, though I'll make do with IPA.
But of course, this wouldn't all be worthy of a rant without noting that my cursed laptop also got in on the act, providing me with a sixth disk failure in 72 hours. At least I won't have to explain this one to management, but I may need to ship it to Taiwan again. Of course, it could just be a loose hard drive cable. I have my fingers crossed, but with my recent tech luck, I'm not too optimistic.
If this keeps up, I may have to take some time away from any technology not fixable with a length of 2x4 and a mouthfull of 10 penny nails....