Today was one long-ass day. First, I was running late because I didn’t want to get out of bed. Buddy tried getting me up by bouncing on my face. It was a nice try on his part.
When I got to work, my boss came in and started sketching out the things he needs me to be working on right away. I have six number one priorities. It was not a good way to start the day. Hell, my coffee was still steaming.
Don’t get me wrong. My boss is a good guy—a really good guy, and if you keep reading on, you’ll understand why.
One of the things I do on a regular basis is to restore a copy of our databases onto test and development servers. I have this down to a science. Today, I did the ultimate DBA fuckup. I ran the restore process on the production database server instead of the test server. 30 seconds into it, one of my coworkers came running into my office asking what was happening. I saw my career flash before my eyes. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. All three of our business units are in the midst of month-end reconciliations, known as CTCs. This happened about 2:30 and we were down for just about an hour. Worse yet, we had to go back to our noon backup, meaning we lost about two hours worth of data.
In any other company I’ve ever worked, a DBA who did that would have been shown the door immediately. Had my boss fired me on the spot, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise. I fucked up, and I fucked up big. Instead, my boss asked what happened, how it happened, and what we can do to prevent it in the future. He went to talk to the finance director of the group who has their stuff due tomorrow and explained the situation. Everyone was surprisingly calm. Tonight, I’m fortunate to still be employed. I explained to my boss that any other company would have shown me the door, and he coolly replied “We don’t work that way.” This isn’t the end of it, I’m sure, but we handled it pretty well. Remember when I said that my boss is a really good guy? I meant that.
I really believe that the measure of a person isn’t really in the mistakes they make, but how they handle those mistakes. Considering what was at stake here, I remained relatively calm through this. I’m still going to be in our New York office tomorrow.
My coworker Debbie asked me if I needed to go out for a drink. I almost took her up on that.