Software fix coming up

An online application owned by my department (that I’m in charge of) has been sending me nightly “failure” messages since December 20. I’ve been reaching out to both our internal IT and our contractor who built it, and have not been getting anywhere. The issue has to do with the application pulling data from an internal database, and the contractor (who is very good) could not fix it because they do not have complete access to the database.

Meanwhile the internal IT employee who had been assigned to our application went AWOL. I mean, totally. She simply quit coming to work, and did not reply to attempts to reach her. Shortly before Christmas she announced to her boss that she was leaving early that day in order to get married (and no one even knew she was engaged) and then no one ever saw or heard from her again.

Of course we’re worried about her – what if something bad happened? But we know she has family in the area, so we have to assume she’s ok and she just didn’t want her job anymore. HR is processing a dismissal. She’s an experienced programmer, why would she want a dismissal on her record when she could have simply filled out her resignation paperwork? Or maybe she got a great new job already and just didn’t care?

Meanwhile, every night at 2 AM I get a failure notification email from our software. Then suddenly, after nothing for 2 weeks, my email explodes with IT chatter. VPN, java stack, oracle, grab values, exception trapping, unique constraints, Test vs QA vs Prod, DB schemas, and “Can you have one of your DBAs look at that sproc?”

I don’t know what any of that means, but I do know what this wonderful line means: “I just checked over the…contract…and database support is covered under “problem support” in the contract SoW. (I mistakenly thought that was not the case).”

Translation: We don’t have to rely on our internal IT because we have the money to pay the contractor to fix my software. Yay!

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