Get to know your tech support engineer.

Whenever I have to work with support engineers I usually try to be friendly, and make the best of the situation. It's very stressful when your LTO robot craps out, and the person on the other end of the line, who is supposed to be the subject-matter expert, comes back with "holy shit I've never seen it do THAT before!" Our profession requires a lot of patience. There is a lot of waiting involved. It also requires a sense of perspective (this isn't open heart surgery) and a sense of humor.

Today, I spent about 4 hours on the phone with a Veritas engineer, trying to fix a Netbackup issue. I'm going to document it later, but the nutshell of the problem was that the master server wouldn't recognize the robot after I performed a pretty routine software upgrade. We tried all sorts of fixes, and eventually ended up rolling back the upgrade.

While we were waiting for various installs, uninstalls, and restores, we got to know each other pretty well. He told me all about his first wife, second wife, and current wife. I don't know why, but people seem to enjoy telling me personal details about their lives. We also discussed the Yankees (no love lost), the Marlins (interesting to see what happens), and the Mets (clearly this is going to be the year). I am pretty good at steering most conversations my way, and sometimes I do it inadvertently. So eventually, he ended up telling me that his father had a whole bunch of Tom Lehrer LPs, which are now sitting somewhere in his basement. He has no interest in them whatsoever ("is that supposed to be funny somehow?") and when he goes home tonight, he'll try to find them and send them to me! How cool is that?

Oh, the robot problem seems to have been fixed. But I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time in the machine room on Monday, anyway.