Wow what a day

Today was . An administrator had wiped and re-installed windows on a laptop they were getting rid of, but they couldn’t get the WiFi working. It turns out somehow the cards driver had the smart card setting turned on, once I turned that off all was well. After that, I went down to the vending machine to get a cookie, because sometimes you just need a cookie. I needed more than a cookie…

When I returned to my desk I was met by a co-worker who informed me that there was problems with the SIRSI Unicorn system. I checked the system and found that things were not working well. I signed onto the server, and the system was at 50% utilization (dual processor), most of that being taken up by the Oracle database. I tried to get the system to give me a status report on all of the Unicorn services, only to have the status tool freeze. I then checked to see who was on the system, and found that a Client Care person was already on our system. I thought perhaps they were doing something trying to fix one of the other problems we have. So I called them, reported that we were down, but that someone was already on the system. They put me in touch with the person working on the system, who immediately began to look into my new problem.
After about 10 minutes of me twiddling my thumbs the tech called back and informed me that things were definitely weird, and he was getting some of the higher level people involved. The group continued working, and working, phone calls came and went. Still the system didn’t respond. Finally they decided as a last ditch effort, to kill the oracle processes. That scared me, for fear the data might be corrupted by the improper shutdown of Oracle, but there really wasn’t any other choice, it wasn’t listening to its commands. After they killed the Oracle processes, and tried to restart them, Oracle refused to start at all. I’m not sure who was more scared, the Sirsi guys, or myself. At that point they decided to try a reboot of the system, when it came back up the Sirsi folks did some tests and Oracle seemed OK. They started up the system, and everything seemed fine. As of 3:30 today everything seemed to be running fine again. I was assured by the Client care folks that they would continue to look into the system, as they have never seen this behavior before.
After things settled down with the library system, I enjoyed the food from the campus holiday party. When I returned from the party I started to look over the system again, when the phone rang. It was my mother, crying. She had fallen in the house when trying to bring in groceries. I asked her if she had pressed her emergency button. That question was met with a wail and an angry “NO!!!” Rather than call the paramedics, and have them help her and look her over, she didn’t want to be embarrassed. Rather, she wanted to lay on the floor for 45 minutes while I drove home from work. I tried again to get her to press the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” button, but she refused. So I left work early, and drove home. When I got home she manged to scoot onto her wheelchair lift, and we used it as a hoist to lift her up, I then got her stood up, and she was able to walk to her chair.

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