Overtime sucks in the IT field

If you're in IT, you know what I mean. We usually don't get paid overtime, as is my case, but when the extra time is required, it is usually the most painful times at work. This weekend wasn't too bad for me. We replaced the UPS that supplies power to our server room this weekend. This meant that we had to come in Saturday morning at 2am to shut all equipment down, then 1 hour later bring it all back up once we were switched off of the old UPS. We then spent the next hour testing that everything came up successfully. We had so much fun Saturday morning, we decided to do it again Sunday morning. The was needed to switch us to the new UPS. Luckily for me, all the hardware under my responsibility came back up with no problems. Unfortunately for our Unix team, they weren't so lucky. They lost 1 piece of hardware Saturday morning and another Sunday morning. Between our two Unix admins, I think they got a total of 8 hours of sleep from Friday morning to Sunday evening.

So let this be a lesson to all you kids out there that want to get into IT and systems administration. Your personal weekend time is always dependent on work and the whims of the hardware you support.

Does your company's computer equipment need power?

Mine sure does. They are going to ruin next weekend for me to prove it. I just got out of a meeting where it was decided that I get to come in at 1am next week Saturday morning to shut every server down, wait for the electrician to cut the data center over to dirty power, then bring all servers back up and test functionality. At this point the electrician(s) starts the process of replacing our current UPS (Universal Power Supply). Then at 1am on Sunday morning, I get to do it all over again while we cut back to the UPS supplied "clean" power. The whole process is needed from a company viewpoint as well as my own. In the last month, our current UPS has had 2 "glitches" and failed to supply power for about 10 seconds each. Each of those occurances caused me about 3 hours of work to test and troubleshoot each individual piece of hardware. Cross your fingers for me that next weekends endeavors are successful.