Data Blocker

So, yeah, deadline week again, but this time with a twist: first, when I got to work this morning, I got a pop-up reminder for an all-staff meeting that I'd completely forgotten about. We only have these a couple of times a year, so it's not like I can avoid going. It ate up over an hour of time I should have been spending on other stuff, but I managed to recover.

Then at 5:15, after spending the balance of the day in overdrive, I went to the browser interface we use for our database to start uploading newsletter articles. I'd used it for something else about half an hour previously, so the tab was still open. I clicked the "add new content" link and got "Service temporarily unavailable" in my browser window. I hadn't seen that before, ever.

I considered the situation: the databases talk to each other overnight, so the articles had to be in place by the end of today in order for them to be available on our web site tomorrow. The coworker who deals with issues like this, on the rare occasions when they arise, left on vacation yesterday. The support people for that particular piece of kit are in Malaysia, and I might have had their email address, from being CC'd on something two years ago, buried in my filed messages somewhere.

I decided to go home. I knew I could access the database from home, and fortunately whatever was going on had resolved itself by the time I looked at it. I'd copied my files onto a USB drive so I could just upload them from here. So everything's fine now. Let's hope it's still fine when I get to work tomorrow.