Misunderestimating me

November 4, 2004 D. H. McKee

Off

Got yelled at by a customer (yeah, same bunch of guys). This one is precious. I get paged in the middle of the night — one of the servers went offline, and mysteriously came back online about 15min later. Apparently, there was a slow VM leak in the version of FreeBSD we’re using on this box. So it reboots, does a 15min fsck, then comes “mysteriously” back online. So I call into their tech support line, and tell them about it. The guy appears non-phased by this, so I tell him to mail my contact, and I’ll call him at 10, when I come in.
After fighting to get back to sleep for the rest of the night, I drag my tired ass into work at 10. I ping the server to make sure it’s up, and I also ping the other production server for good measure. The other server is *offline* (I don’t know about the VM issue yet). So I call my contact and tell him the server is down. He says “Yeah, it’s OK, I rebooted it.” I ponder this, then tell him again that his server is offline. He says “It’s OK, we’re doing some testing.” I tell him to let me know when he’s finished testing, and I hang up, making a note to call him at 4pm in case the thing’s not back online. At 4:01pm, I get a conference call from my contact, his boss, and *his* boss. They begin yelling at me for a while, and I weakly defend myself by saying “But I called you at 10am this morning, not 5 min after it went offline.”
Apparently, the name of his test server sounds a lot like the name of the production server that I monitor, and he misunderstood my early morning call. After I made this clear to him, he and his team continued yelling at me for a while.
So now I have to upgrade FreeBSD on six machines, including one in a 3am maintenance window (3 hour upgrade, yay). AND I get yelled at. Seriously. Actual yelling took place.

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As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

Writers often treat the bio like it’s an interview or something. Maybe like they’re having a conversation with you, the reader. While it may work sometimes, the most common way to write a bio is to write in the 3rd person.

I’m like those writers, and I’m talking to you directly, unlike the common way to do a bio. You should see my About page. It makes sense to me, since this is a bit which describes my blog’s website. When I get famous enough that I don’t have time to talk to you, I’ll have an intern write everything in 3rd person. Until then, you get to talk to me.

Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.