Premonitions of Ardencote
March 2010
In my secret life as a racing driver I spend quite a lot of time in hotel rooms. I will book the room over the Internet a month or so in advance, turn up on the Friday before the race and then leave on the Sunday.Given the types of hotel I stay in are usually either a Premier Inn or Travelodge and could only be described as top of the range if you are Lenny Henry, I never expect 5-star treatment and I always expect the people on reception to have the IQ of a retarded monkey. Nevertheless I have never given a second thought to there being a problem with a booking. The website works, there is a record of my reservation in my online account and I get email confirmation so I just assume that it will be alright when I get there.
So it struck me as odd when I booked a weekend away with my girlfriend at possibly the poshest hotel I've ever stayed at in England and had a dream the night before we were to leave that involved us being refused entry because they didn’t have space for us.
Now, I don’t tend to remember dreams and I’m generally not the paranoid type but this dream woke me up and left me worrying so much I couldn’t get back to sleep again. I had a strong gut feeling that something was wrong so I phoned the hotel and double-checked my booking on the morning of our arrival. My instincts proved correct as it turned out the booking agent had never notified them of my reservation and they had no record whatsoever that we were arriving that evening. Had I not phoned to check, my lovely girlfriend and I would've probably been politely asked to leave the premises and would have had to spend a cozy and romantic night sleeping in my car.
The lady at the hotel was very apologetic, extremely friendly and took my details direct over the phone. She even honoured my request to give me email confirmation of our telephone exchange in case I turned up and they still hadn't booked us in. In return I was very accepting of her apology, told her that it wasn't a problem and I was looking forward to staying at their hotel and thanked her for her help.
You see I’m a decent and understanding kind of guy and I appreciate that, although they were ultimately responsible for our failed booking, it was by no means their fault. If they didn't get a notification from a third party agent, how were they supposed to know about it? It would have been pretty harsh if I'd blamed them for being incompetent when in reality the failure was completely out of their hands. I’m in a minority here because most people in this world aren’t quite as considerate as me and in fact a lot of people are just plain thick and this brings me neatly onto the subject of my other job as a technical director for a website company and more specifically the subject of our web servers.
You see sometimes computers crash. I hate it when that happens and when web servers go down it is doubly horrible because we have hundreds of people's businesses at stake – including our own! The problem is, like a hotel that relies on booking agents, we have no direct control over our servers because we have to keep them at a third party server farm where they are all kept in cryogenic freezers in high security buildings where all employees go through a complete background check and have to have palm-print scans and anal probes just to access the room.
I am serious when I tell you that I don’t even know where the servers are. I have to arrange a secret rendezvous with an engineer in a car park somewhere and hand over our hardware in the same way that a shady drug deal might go down. That is the last I will ever see of the server until I need to recall it, whereby we will arrange another meeting where he will give me the server back and then shoot me in the back of the head when I leave so that I can never tell anyone what he looks like.
The only access I will ever get to the server is over a broadband connection. When I'm at home or in the office I can access the server remotely and restart it if it crashes. Sadly, when I'm sitting in the Ardencote hotel Jacuzzi sipping champagne enjoying a well deserved break, I don't have this luxury. Even when I'm in the office I'm limited in what I can do because sometimes the geniuses at the server farm have "power failures" which I'm pretty sure means one of the clumsy twerps has tripped over the cables and pulled the plug out of the back. Again, there is little we can do about this other than phone them up and pray that the technician didn't electrocute himself during the tumble and can put the plug back in.
It’s always interesting when this happens because I guarantee that within 2 seconds of it going offline the phones will start ringing with irate customers demanding to know what the hell has happened to their website. It’s always amusing to see how many people come out of the woodwork. It’s always the same pretentious individuals who pay us virtually nothing, the same irritating people who we never hear a peep out of unless something goes wrong and will always demand to know how long the problem is going to take to fix. My answer to these geniuses is always the same: The longer they keep me on the phone, the longer it will take to fix because they are preventing me from doing my job.
So it's important to get the message across that we are always aware when the server goes down but there will be occasions when our response time might be slower due to circumstances beyond our control. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our nice customers who were patient when two of our servers went down over the weekend and ruined what was an otherwise good break for me. To those who are less understanding and felt the need to cry over it, you will be pleased to know that it appears I've started having premonitions so rest assured I'll be working on this new found ability in order to anticipate when the server is going to crash in future. Hopefully this will speed up response time and allow me to spend more time in the Jacuzzi.
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