Heck of a Day

Wow. Today was more like a day and a half. With the cutbacks on hours and such, I hadn't worked all the way through a lunch in a couple months, and today, I didn't have much of a choice aas I wolfed down my ramen noodles in between dealing with the chaos that erupted today. Almost literally, the sky was falling and Chicken Little didn't warn us about any of it.

It took some research, but at about 10:00, we discovered the problem started at 6:04 this morning when the Enterprise Data Center that handles 30% of our Medicare traffic decided it didn't want to make any of its product selections valid. The jobs assigned to this data center failed like crazy, and while we're used to seeing these types of failures, they've never been on a scale like this before. Just restarting these tasks wasn't working. Nothing was working.

One curiosity though. It seems that the problem only occurred via our software's load balanced IP address. We found using the "old address" that doesn't have the capacity to deal with our daily traffic, but can handle us running our little tests managed to access this data center without any problem at all. Well, that's misspeaking. We can access the center, we just couldn't access the Medicare system because it told us the options were "unavailable." This lead me to the next part of this task...

Someone had to start making some calls, and the best starting place was our connection vendor. Being that I'd been in the middle of this from the beginning, I made the call. The person was very nice, listened to the problem, and when I walked him through it, he said that since we're able to get into the EDC menus, the connection they're providing appears to be working, and we would have to contact EDC for further assistance. I thanked him, took the number, and prepared to call EDC, or for all intents and purposes, Medicare.

And this is where the nightmare began...

It was around lunchtime when I hit this part of my adventure. We'd learned a lot so far, and just had to get this one hurdle out of the way to determine where to go next. So I made the call. not only were their lines busy, but I got a busy signal. I continued to call every 5 to 10 minutes and continued to get a busy signal.

Finally, I got through to the hold music, so I waited. Twenty minutes later, a guy picked up. I explained who I was and that our software that interacts with their system is unable to reach FSS because we're getting a message in our logs that states the application we're selecting is unavailable. He asked if this was the login screen. I explained it again that it was after the login screen at the selection screen. He asked is this was in FSS. I explained yet again that it was before that. He said if we're having problems with the login, we had to call someone else. I explained again that it was after the login and before the FSS. He finally got it, and said I had to call a different number. I explained it again, and he asked which provider I was with. This lead me to believe that I was in the right place. I said I maintain the software used by the providers to access their system and we're getting this error message. He asked for a login. I don't have a login. He wanted one. I pulled a log and gave him one. He said I shouldn't be using a login since I'm not a provider. Is this a trap?

Finally, the guy completely shut down and declared he could not help me since I'm not a provider and was not authorized to use the login. This was an exceptionally weird turn of the conversation, but all right. He wasn't budging and I certainly couldn't make him, regardless of the fact that it apparently dealt with our connection as opposed to a login issue (unless over 100 providers suddenly had login problems). He wouldn't talk so that was over..

I would not be swayed, however. You see, I know people. My next step was fiendishly clever, since I knew I could beat this yahoo and make him talk to me. What did I do? I called a provider who is hyper-spastic about her system working. It was broken, and she'd want it fixed. I called her and she was more than happy to be the provider and get him to talk to me.

I called back and it was busy. I let her know I'd give her a ring when I got through.

Fifteen minutes later, I called her back because I was on hold again. We waite twenty minutes and we got the same guy. He recognized me and said he wasn't able to talk to me earlier because I wasn't a provider. I told him I wet out and found one to talk to him. He spoke exclusively with her for a short while, and was actually very rude about doing so.

Finally, I had my chance and I let him have it. I explained the problem yet again. Are you at the login screen? No, after that. In FSS? No, before that. Didn't we go over this before? I talked to this guy for another ten minutes trying to make him understand the big problem, and you know what he finally told me? You have to call this other department; I don't deal with that. He made a point of telling me that he told me this earlier. I made a point of telling him in return that when I had given him further information earlier and then he conversed about it, I thought it was something he handled. He said something about the systems department handling the hyperterminal connection, which sounded very techie and could be right, so I acquiesced and said I'd call this other number. He was apparently happy about that because he rather immediately hung up.

I was not happy. I was shaking I was so frustrated with this turn of events. All day and still nothing to show for myself. The lady I'd gotten on the phone, however, said I was awesome. Probably because I kept a very cool head, discussed the system in more detail than anyone had any business to, and pushed hard for him to help me, even though he didn't in the end. She was probably just happy that someone was trying.

Well, I called the other number and got a message stating that they were very busy and unable to take any calls at this time and to leave a voicemail. I was ok with this, and prepared to leave a message. I hate talking to voicemail because I think I sound like an idiot. Well, I was spared becuase the next message stated that the voice mailbox was full and I couldn't leave a message. There's government funding for you. Shoddy service and a full voicemail. Someone should check it.

Anyway, I waited until later and called again. This time, I got through to systems, or better known to them as their EDI department. I explained the problem and who I was and what I needed. The woman, who sounded very nice, told me she doesn' deal with the DDE at all. No, she handles batch clearinghouse processing, not the interactiveness of the DDE. I needed to talk to the department I started at...you know, the jerk who told me to call this number?

But all was not lost. No, I got an email address for their DDE support, so I could at least email them. I commented on this to Optimus Prime who told me that there would be a three month wait for a reply on it, or so he had last heard. Well, whether that is the case or not, I figured I'd email anyway.

Five minutes later, I got a reply...or rather, a delivery notification stating that the email address wasn't valid. Something tells me these people aren't interested in helping me.

What's in a Name Anyway?

First off, I want to throw out there that The Engineer enjoyed Twilight and completely understood it. So, they did well enough on the movie so that you don't HAVE to have read the books to understand the movie. I will say again that it helped, though.

On another note, though, when we were out this weekend, I ran across an individual with a most unfortunate name. Naturally, I only saw their name on the obligatory retail store name tag, and I didn't talk to the person about it. Then again, I'm probably one of a handful of people who would have seen this person that would even have known this tidbit of information. I'm sure most people who see it think, "oh, that's different" and move on. But not me. Oh no. I've got to analyze it.

Sometimes, parents want to give their children common names with clever spellings to make them feel unique and give their future teachers (employers) hell when trying to spell their names correctly. This only leads to the child catching hell for the rest of their lives since they go with life with an "extended name" of sorts -- that being "name" with "weirdness." (eg. Wendy with an "i" [Wendi] or Jennifer with one "n" [Jenifer].) Normally, these respellings only cause an annoyance for the owner and don't have a completely different and sinister meaning such and the person I saw this weekend.

This weekend, I saw someone named Charon stocking a shelf. Now, I'm sure Charon's parents felt they were being terribly clever by torturing their newborn baby girl with "Sharon with a C" to help her normal name feel a bit different in a world of Sharon's. When we were walking around and I spotted this name, I told the Queen that I thought it had to do with Hell in some language's mythology, but I couldn't quite remember at the time. I looked it up this morning because it was bothering me still.

What her parents probably did not realize through their ignorance of Greek mythology is that Charon is "the ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. Some authors say that those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, had to wander the shores for one hundred years. In the catabasis mytheme, heroes — such as Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche — journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon." (Lifted from Wikipedia)

This means that Charon is actually a male name, not female. He's got a couple of different names depending on the mythology you're looking at, but Charon is his Greek and primary one. Charon is usually depicted as a cranky and skinny old man in a cloth that is falling off of his bits and pieces or more modernly, the Grim Reaper, but I think this one is more amusing, and is found in the lower right hand corner of Michelangelo's Last Judgment painting in the Sistine Chapel. What Charon is holding here is his oar, and he's beating the crap out of the souls getting into his boat to ferry across the river Styx. I wonder if Charon knows who she's a namesake for...