What is it you do again?

In the late 1990s I worked for a Midwestern manufacturer. We ran a very small IT shop for the size of our corporation (8 people for a company grossing a third of a billion dollars annually, across 10 locations), and all of us in IT were expected to wear many hats. I was a programmer, analyst and project manager when I wasn't network administrator and tech support. From our corporate office, I was directly respon

In the late 1990s I worked for a Midwestern manufacturer. We ran a very small IT shop for the size of our corporation (8 people for a company grossing a third of a billion dollars annually, across 10 locations), and all of us in IT were expected to wear many hats. I was a programmer, analyst and project manager when I wasn't network administrator and tech support. From our corporate office, I was directly responsible for five factories around the Great Lakes area, and I also helped out the MIS staff at our factory just down the road.

A year before, I had responded to a Friday plant disaster that left inventory and manufacturing untouched but destroyed the office space and all computers. Thanks to spare equipment and offsite backup tapes, our Monday morning shipments went out on time, saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. This event opened the purse strings a bit, and I was allowed to purchase a backup server to use in case one of the other factories had a similar disaster.

Like many companies at that time, we decided to jump on the ERP bandwagon. All the upper-level execs were involved, as we were going to avoid all of the mistakes that other companies were making, and have a cost-effective and pain-free implementation. I was not involved in the planning, being too low on the totem pole. For the next several months, the bigwigs confabbed while I set about improving our network infrastructure and documenting in-house applications. I couldn't work on any new projects, as we didn't know which ERP we would be getting and what would be made obsolete. At one point, the VP of Finance asked the CIO why I still worked there. To his credit, my boss said that although I was not going to be involved in the ERP planning, I would be instrumental in the installation and training. I, of course, brushed up the résumé and prepared for the inevitable.

One Wednesday morning I was in my cube drinking my first cup of coffee, when I heard the unmistakable sound of the disaster server being removed from its home in the next cube. I stepped around the partition to find Bill, the head of MIS for the plant down the road, holding an armload of server components with a panicked look on his face. I asked him what was up.

Bill explained that there had been an extended power outage at the plant, and the UPS system had shut down the server in a controlled fashion. When the power returned, Bill turned everything back on, only to find that all the hard drives in the external RAID array were dead. The MIS staff tried everything they could think of but couldn't get the drives working again. They were going to swap in the disaster server.