“Tales of a Scorched Coffee Pot” — Chapter 39

The little blurb people put beside their name in Twitter is usually far more comical than anything they ever post. This is one thing Jack Lincoln has noticed, scrolling through that social media time suck in his down time.

But then again, these sites all have their winning attributes. With LinkedIn, he likes the mayhem of their connection suggestions. At the top of their endless doom scroll, the first name is seemingly always someone you’ve never met nor heard of, followed by some random ex-coworker who isn’t a mutual connection with anyone else. Whom you haven’t seen, talked to, texted, or for that matter even thought about in 12 years. Meanwhile, your closest friends in real life, who have on average about 186 mutual connections in common with you, never show up at all.

Jack thinks there’s a sweet spot in the algorithm here, however unintentional. It’s like some bizarre combination of bad coding and the company’s own deliberate yet zany ideas on the best way to run things. Whatever the case, it sure is fascinating — even as he wonders how they, Twitter, and a whole host of other platforms ever hope to make money, to sustain themselves long-term.

But, alas, these are but mere entertainments, combed through as always during the hurry-up-and-wait downtime involved with the actual IT projects. Today’s is a doozy, although in some weird way you almost enjoy the major train wrecks more, for the novelty, because it keeps you more engaged — you can only reset someone’s email password or investigate mysterious internet outages so many times before losing one’s mind. Although regarding this place, to say a crisis counts as a “doozy” is a steadily escalating bar.

To summarize, he’s currently helping to rebuild the entire database at Palmyra, due to a server crash. But his involvement with the process is to basically open doors and point the way, metaphorically, because only a tech guy from Slingshot has the know-how to repair the actual damage himself. Thank God for modern technology, though, the ability to dial in and remotely connect, to transmit files over shared drives. He can only imagine what a project like this would have been like ten or twenty years ago, with the Slingshot HQ located clear up in the Boone, the servers parked here at Bellwether’s main office, and Palmyra situated about halfway in between.

So that’s the primary thread today. But of course, the mundane is rearing its head in tandem, or at least, again, mundane as far as this place is concerned. To whit, the store’s office on Central has been without internet for much of the day, but not the store itself. And the one person working in that office who might be able to troubleshoot the basics and speed up this process by ruling those out, Edgar, happens to be up in Palmyra today himself. Well, no, Valerie can also at least be coached through troubleshooting the basics; Edgar knows enough to investigate the basics himself before contacting IT; as for the rest, he suspects half of them have possibly never heard of the internet.

When he attempted calling Valerie’s extension, it just rang and went to voicemail. He’s gotten a detailed, bemused rundown from Edgar, though — bemused because they are both on the same page, kind of a we really wouldn’t expect anything else at this point, but whatever, it’s kind of funny and definitely not boring type vibe — first in a quick phone chat, when he called Edgar to get the lowdown, then from the formal support ticket submitted on their web portal, the official process Felix instituted a couple of months ago.

The basic gist of it is that Palmyra requested Edgar spend the day there, to help them get their inventory in order; this server crash apparently happened overnight, as the openers arrived this morning to discover this wonderful unexpected gift; about an hour or so later, responding to an earlier support ticket Edgar had opened with Slingshot, a process initiated yesterday, they called him about this mysterious issue concerning bulk orders not transmitting, only to the Harmony Hill vendor and only from the Central store. Any of the obvious, user error type causes have been eliminated on both ends, meaning Slingshot alone must investigate this issue as well.

So they’ve got the office terminal tied up at two different stores. Meanwhile, when Edgar attempted to remote into his own desktop computer, to retrieve some files he needs up in Palmyra today, he discovered that the internet appeared to be out. A phone call to Barbara confirms that it has been all day, but nobody bothered reporting it, they’d all apparently been sitting around twiddling their thumbs up there.

Felix has been adamant that they fill out support tickets for every tech related issue — to document progress, but also so that IT can account for their time and justify their expenses. Even when the internet is out, he wants them filling out a support ticket. The problem is that, yes, while almost everyone has a smart phone by now (another baffling aspect, Jack thinks, for those who are claiming they don’t have a grasp on something as simple as hitting a reset button on a modem), the web portal Felix has created has some serious compatibility issues, the scale doesn’t adjust well to mobile. Jack has seen it himself first hand. And mentioned as much to Felix, for that matter. You can type maybe four words, before needing to scroll sideways, or else continue typing away without viewing the output — a prospect that rightfully horrifies most of them. So the general workaround process here is that Jack will keep the internet outage on the down low, investigate and fix it, then fill out a support ticket after the fact himself, close it out a short while later.

Central’s office is just out of luck for the time being, until he finishes shepherding this Palmyra server crash. But he takes it that this is not a crisis to anyone present at that office today. Still, Jack is certain that this black cloud of tech mishaps will continue to hang over the Healthy Shopper Market, due to outdated infrastructure, outdated equipment. And the reason for this, Jack has also increasingly begun to suspect, is that Felix’s knowledge is itself outdated.

So this has created its own separate island of a conundrum, apart from all other issues. The question being how do you continue to fix this stuff, yet just essentially shrug when they’re asking why these things keep happening, without throwing Felix to the dogs, yet also without looking like a complete idiot yourself? The answer to that, so far, has been to keep things low key, say you’ll take a look at the issue ASAP, mutter it’s cool, it’s cool a lot, and then give them some technical mumbojumbo most wouldn’t understand anyway, after it’s (temporarily) fixed. But how long can this rickety levee continue to hold? That’s the real question, which Felix and pretty much everyone else eternally evades.