A long time ago a customer called in and asked me to install some hardware they sent (an Ethernet card for a router) right away. I declined - the router it needed to be installed in was a shared device, and we'd had problems with hot swapping cards[0] in this model of router before. I told them I'd do it after hours that evening, but not during the day. This would have been maybe a 3 or 4 hour delay for them.
About 30 minutes later, my boss comes into my office and says the owner of the other company called to complain that they felt like "marcus0x62 never wants to help us". (I had - just the week before - gone into the data center on Friday night on about 1 hour notice to do something for them without complaint of any kind.) My boss said "I don't need [the other company] thinking we don't want to help them." He seemed pretty angry and wasn't interested in any explanations. Ok, I said. No problem. I'll take care of it right away. I figured there was, based on past history, about a 25% chance this router would reboot on the spot when I put that card it.
So, I went into the data center and inserted their card into an open slot. And all the blinkenlights lit up. I went back into my office, and the boss was still there. I told him about 25% of our WAN customers would be down for 5 minutes while this router rebooted, and the tech support staff should expect calls.
0 - The router, a Cisco 7200 series device, supported "Online Insertion and Removal", but it didn't always work. And when it didn't work, the router usually rebooted spontaneously.
About 30 minutes later, my boss comes into my office and says the owner of the other company called to complain that they felt like "marcus0x62 never wants to help us". (I had - just the week before - gone into the data center on Friday night on about 1 hour notice to do something for them without complaint of any kind.) My boss said "I don't need [the other company] thinking we don't want to help them." He seemed pretty angry and wasn't interested in any explanations. Ok, I said. No problem. I'll take care of it right away. I figured there was, based on past history, about a 25% chance this router would reboot on the spot when I put that card it.
So, I went into the data center and inserted their card into an open slot. And all the blinkenlights lit up. I went back into my office, and the boss was still there. I told him about 25% of our WAN customers would be down for 5 minutes while this router rebooted, and the tech support staff should expect calls.
0 - The router, a Cisco 7200 series device, supported "Online Insertion and Removal", but it didn't always work. And when it didn't work, the router usually rebooted spontaneously.