I just got back from the nearby Safeway. They have a branch bank on-premise; I went to get some cash from the ATM, and to deposit a paper check. Their cashier windows are open on Sunday afternoon, a convenience of modern times. I’m old school enough that I don’t trust ATMs to make such deposits; no sir, endorse the check, fill out a deposit slip, and hand it to the human behind the counter. That’s the ticket.

I clipped the stinking on-call pager to the waistband of my unbelted chinos before I left the house. As I was walking from the car to the store, I passed over a large, grate-covered storm drain. The grate openings appeared to be large enough that if the stinking on-call pager were to become dislodged from my waistband and take a judicious trajectory, that it could easily be at the bottom of that drain; with rain in the forecast, it could well be washed away to the bottom of a river, or better yet, out into the Atlantic, never to be heard from again. I’m not exactly skinny; part of my waistline spare tire could easily dislodge the electronic jailkeeper,and send it to the fate it so richly deserves. Alas, it wasn’t to happen today.

We have a member of our group who has lost the stinking on-call pager; he was running errands, got home, and found that the so-cp was nowhere to be found. He retraced his steps, even calling the infernal device from his cell phone at appropriate times. No soap. This guy is an excellent sysadmin; if you have any cluster software or Veritas filesystems in need of tweakage, he’s your man. If you’ve guzzled the Oracle RAQ kool-aid, he can help you out there. So, in spite of all his techincal acumen, this guy has never stood taller in my mind than on the day he lost the stinking on-call pager. We had a replacement so-cp by lunchtime; so the victory was short-lived. On a visceral level, though, this was a victory for the common man. Nothing like putting the so-cp into the Atlantic would have been, but a victory nonetheless.

-k-