Oh, you… The one who’s had to be working late, been having some restless sleep, nudging hellish and cryptic trains of thought.
Silent Battles have been raging on.
Battles very few people ought to see, any many of them ought to even know they ever happened. Into the lines of one terminal, server down, the DR kicks in, HA spuns up, and an alarmed state gets triggered.
Everything’s rigged against the odds, timelines exceed and you ought to make it right or at least, to know what’s gone wrong, in the first place, afterall. Not much has been surmized so far, but something must be done, boss’ shouting and everything’s gone to havoc, no one knew where the backup might have went.
So far, you feel the world sinking in… But nobody knows about it, and for what the world knows, everything’s running well, albeit, you know that not so well, indeed…
But even so, the battles must wage on, march against our wills of fixing the problems that we never even had an idea how they have started in the first place. We just ought to get it done, as fast as possible, with minimal disturbances as possible. Who would even care? Well, you do, and so your bills, and maybe your family too… You start thinking on all the horrendous scenarios that might unfold in your life if you get fired who’ll afford for them? Pay the rent?
And what about your reputation? And even more, you false sense of pride which had it knowingly that something should go wrong, you had to know the way to fix it…. except, that you didn’t. But if things were easy then everyone else would be doing it, wouldn’t it? So then there’s the skill issue also, you’ve always been thinking you should have studied more about certain aspects that nag you at work, but you never could…. or so is what you tell you sometimes.
But then, right then and right there, another fellow, also fighting his inisible battles to the outside world, pings on you, suddenly, promptly asking if you had remembered to check the last commit message and the release notes before it hit production.
You did, but what could have you missed? One last look and, oh… Seems that there’s also been a version upgrade of adjacent software, and that might have impacted things throughout. Huh. Who would have guessed it?
Rollout started, rollback initiated, preemptively selected manually the last compatible version that was stable before, and hit Enter.
A few minutes fly by, cold sweat, harsh thoughts upon oneself, and all you can be guessing, is if the fallout in the several meetings to come next would point out this error. Maybe they wouldn’t, who knew?
Oh, green signal, and the system seems to be crawling back to normal again. Guess what? Prompts to the guy who nudged you with that advice. I guess who could have seen it coming like so.
This battle, for now, seemed to be over, but then, who guesses, when would the entirety of the war be over, for real, with no more struggling battles taking over with no notice. That, of course, was still a dream come true… Maybe, one day, maybe, when there are no more updates of any kind, but of course, it wouldn’t materialize.
Then, the silent battles still wage and rage ferociously, each and everyday, most of which we never knew that had even started, or even happened, at all, just because everything seemed normal, we still could never really know what lied behind the veil of said ’normalcy'.
But then again, we’ll have to see, in the hopes that these silent battles do not turn out into outrageous ones.
Peace to you all, my folks, who fight the daily fights of these unbeknownst battles thyself.