Remember the old excuse when homework hadn’t been done: “My dog ate my homework”.
Being a goody-goody or simply too lacking in creativity I don’t recall not handing in homework but that’s a different discussion.
In my ‘day job’ at Demand Flow Intelligence there was a big project which we’d committed to delivering by the end of January.
Fortunately, the technical division of the client is based in the US which meant I had until Monday night to deliver 11 files for uploading into their contacts database.
I received the final update from my team, who’d worked on it over the weekend, and my partner, Andy, and I spent Monday reworking it, reviewing it and preparing it for importing.
11.30pm on Monday night it was ready to go.
Letting out a huge sign of relief I pressed the send button on all 11 files and guess what happened….
Nothing!
Absolutely nothing.
Well actually, not “nothing”.
There was a message on the status bar in my email system telling me there was an error sending the files.
I checked the Outbox and there they were: 11 files and one email message waiting to be sent.
On January 15, 2009 Captain Chesley Sullenberger came to world attention when he successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River saving the lives of all 155 people on board.
After the event he famously commented: “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”
While my situation was nothing like that of Capt Sullenberger, it was one of those things where training, practice and habits came in very useful.
I am, by nature, analytical.
Combined with an aversion to sleep, staying up past midnight trying to determine why my files weren’t going became an ‘interesting’ challenge (with an underlining sense of impending panic).
Checking other devices enabled me to establish that the issue was my machine, it wasn’t the internet which was the problem, as it was working on other devices, like my tablet.
I spent quite a while testing various elements on my PC.
A standard one is to shut down and restart – that fixes most weird issues (which is also why a problem never shows up when you take your dud computer into the service company).
Still the files weren’t going.
Eventually, I noticed that the lights on my network switch weren’t flashing.
So, we’re getting closer to the cause of the problem.
Question now was, is it something trivial (like the power plug having come out of the socket) or something more serious (which wasn’t going to get solved at midnight).
I ascertained that the power plug had come out – ahh relief!
However, on reconnecting it I was getting a very odd effect – every light was on – and that wasn’t normal.
Standard first step in correcting any computer dilemma is shut down and start again.
This time it worked.
The switch was behaving normally, the computer (after restarting AGAIN) refound the internet and starting sending the files.
It was such a relief watching them disappear from the Out box and appearing in the Sent folder.
Of course, sleep was then not a great option as I was rather hyped up but eventually that went back to normal and after a couple of hours sleep I was back at my day job.
So, what had caused this calamitous failure?
Sancho, is getting on in years and is quite deaf.
As a consequence he tends to hang around either Danita or me VERY CLOSELY.
On this particular night he was sleeping under the deskĀ next to my feet.
This is where the power box is and he’d managed to roll onto it and knock the plug out of the power point.
Of course I still love him and he didn’t get into any trouble, but he’s being closely watched.