America Through My Eyes – First Holidaying

Days passed fast in America. Without my notice first weekend arrived. I woke up at around 9:30am on Saturday morning; that too when Raju called me. “Wanna have donuts?”

Since I had no other work and the term “Donut” was new to me, I agreed. Donut Den was a coffee shop, straight out of a picture postcard, situated just beside of our apartment complex. We bought coffee and glazed donuts and come out to sit in the sun. Actually we sat under the garden umbrella outside of the shop. There was a cool Pacific breeze coming down from the Palos Verdes. I learned Palos Verdes was the most costliest real estate area after Bverly Hills in California. And it was just the opposite side of the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) on which our apartment complex was. Cigarette, Coffee, Donut – a perfect combination. We chatted for a long time. At noon time we came back and straight-away went for bath. Then we go to KFC for its famous fried chicken. We took the number 1 combo. Two large pieces of chicken fry with mashed potato and coleslaw – Perfect! We came back late in the afternoon around 4pm. Sheikh was out to play football. Here let me remind you Americans, that when we say football, we mean “foot” + “ball” , i.e. soccer; not that structured hooliganism or the deadlier form of rugby. I loved playing football. But I missed this first opportunity to play that in a foreign soil. Next time.

I went to take a nap. Around 7pm when I woke up, everybody was watching The Shawshank Redemption. The movie was rented from Netflix. Nice movie. This Netflix was a nice scheme. Register online, choose your subscription and the movie will be delivered to your door step in original DVD. They had a formidable collection of movies. Still I found its collection could still be increased. It did not had many movies that I knew of, such as, the cult dance movie, Fast Forward.

Sunday morning we did the same thing of going to Donut Den and consumed donuts and coffee. Later it became a ritual for me for the weekends, till I left that place. When we came back Dhrub was jumping around. As per him that was the best day to go to beach. The weather was ideal. So we honored that self-styled weatherman, and headed off to Redondo Beach. Except Shibu, he had to study, everyone else hopped into Dhrub’s car – a Toyota Camry. Huge car. Ample space for leg and head. Dhrub parked the car in a small by-lane a few hundred meters away from the beach. This was because near the beach, there was paid parking of 25c for 30mins. And since we were the greatest fans of Uncle Scrooge, we follow the motto “saved is earned”.

We walked to the beach. Beautiful beach! Unlike beaches in our country there was no hawker, no crowd – a complete serene environment. Bright sunlight reflecting from the water as if million diamonds were sparkling. I got the picture why people call it “Sunny California”. In the bottle green water at a distance where the waves were breaking there were surfers. That was a new thing for me. There were people playing beach vollyball in a permanent court on the sand. There was a concrete path along the sand line. this was for joggers, sketers and cyclists. Fitness freak America!

It was much later, that I understood why they were so much crazy about fitness. Its not just for looking good. Medical care was highly expensive in America. So prevention was better than cure.

There were lots of scantily dressed babes on the beach. Nice eye candy. In fact we were most heavily dressed on the beach at that time. I realized two things, first, not all bikini-clads were beautiful and second, in our beaches if we found any bikini-clad girl, she became an instant sensation to us. Whereas, here these dress is so much plentiful, it did not arouse that much enthusiasm. It was a good proof of the fact that, scarcity made things precious.

Anyway, we sat on the sand smoked a few cigarettes then we went for the pier. Before that we also went to have a feel of the water. In that summer day even, how cold it was! I would not be able to bathe here! The pier was nicely converted into a hangout place complete with shops of all kind. We roamed around for some more time then went to Pizza Hut for lunch and then back to base.

It was Monday again. This week I had to shadow Manu. And next week Manu would shadow me. And the week after Manu would go back home. And slowly I will be the sole responsible person to our project at on site. Foreign locale, unknown work – this was our life in this profession. Everybody in this business started like this am not the first person.

Monday I reached office before Manu. Cathy and Dave were busy at their respective workstations. The moment I turned on my machine Cathy peeked from her cube next to mine. “I think the site is down, dear! We got tickets from dealers across the country. Can you please check?”, she said.  What was she saying??!!! I was perplexed for a moment. Immediately I hit the URL on my browser and that damn thing slapped on my face with “Page Can Not Be Found” message. I was numb on my fingers. I was totally puzzled – what to do now!! First I tried to call Manu but could not reach him. Then I called the Server Support Group(SSG). These specialized people were there to look after our servers round the clock. The first thing that came into my mind is that it must be some OS or hardware issue as there has been no new change since the year 2000 in the codebase. They said they are alrady aware of the situation and they think its related to code. I was new and could not defend myself. I tried to run the application in sub-prod envt and it ran successfully. I ran it locally and it ran there too. Kirsten came by,”What’s going on?” “I do not know yet. I will let you know once I found something.”, I fumbled. I knew this was causing lose of business for the client. At this moment Manu entered. I ran to him. I told him the situation. He calmly said,”Rubbish!! Our code does not have any issue. Its their rotton server, that is creating problem. Am gonna set up a con-call with the SSG. You also join and see what am doing there.”

Con-call started. There were 4 person in the call. Manu and me at one side and the Server Engineer and his manager. Initially nobody had the slightest idea of the issue and both sides were trying to push the ball to each other very politely. Then Manu asked the Engineer to check certain server health parameters like memory usage, network connection and all. He was following his instructions. Then suddenly that guy started shouting over the phone, “Sabotage!! There must be a hacking attempt in our system!” Now this is new; like a hollywood movie! There was an uncanny lull for a minute or so. Then first spoke the manager.”
“Why you thing that this is a sabotage?”
-”I have never seen in my 6years of server administration so much of memory usage. Its using 100% and that’s why the server got hung.”
-”Ok, fine can you please restart the box? And if you are so sure of the sabotage then please do a RCA(Root Cause Analysis) next.”
-”To restart a production box I need a permission.”
This time Manu pitched in, “I think you already have a Severity 1 issue at hand. And since the site is down so there is no point that any user will be affected anyway. Please go ahead.”

Server restarted and like a magic everything came back to normal. Much relived now I ran to Mukti. “Hey, what’s that all about hacking attempt?”

Manu smiled like the wise Buddha.”Sometimes it happens. One process in the server goes deadlock and it slowly starts eating up all the resorces of the server. That way sometimes memory gets full. Comeon you should know that!”
-”Agreed but what if it is true?”
-”Fine, you heard the manager. They are going for the RCA, right? We will see then. Now lets get back to work. Shall we?”

That RCA never came. And thus I got the first feel of a real crisis at client place.