[150100] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Common operational misconceptions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (George Bonser)
Fri Feb 17 14:35:57 2012
From: George Bonser <gbonser@seven.com>
To: Jens Link <lists@quux.de>, "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:35:03 +0000
In-Reply-To: <596B74B410EE6B4CA8A30C3AF1A155EA09CD0AA4@RWC-MBX1.corp.seven.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> A tech trying to troubleshoot it and fix it themselves is going to be
> hounded every five minutes for status updates and won't be able to get
> any work done because every five minutes (I kid you not, I have worked
> where that is a requirement) he has to pull his head out of what he is
> doing and answer a bunch of questions from the PHBs. And you always
> get "how long is it going to be" and you want to say "10 minutes longer
> than it would have been if you hadn't interrupted me" but you bite your
> tongue.
>=20
Though the flip side of that is that if someone has been neck deep in a pro=
blem for hours, you should force them to take a break, go get a drink of wa=
ter, step outside for fresh air or a smoke if they do, or just talk to a co=
lleague for a moment and review the problem. In my case, the stepping away=
for a few minutes has sometimes allowed the answer to the problem to sudde=
nly snap into focus or in the process of describing it to someone else the =
forming of the thoughts to describe it often allows a new aspect of the pro=
blem to become visible that you hadn't noticed before.
