One Minute

This week I think we’ll start with a quick snippet of conversation between Terry and Jerry, two IT gurus, and I that occurred a couple of years ago.

“Jerry, the Exchange server was hung yesterday afternoon.  I had Terry hard boot it.”

“You should never do that!  You can have major data corruption or data loss by doing a hard boot!  Why didn’t you call me?  There’s a bunch of different things you guys should have done. But never ever hard boot an Exchange server.  Oh my God, I’ve gotta go make sure the LUNs are still attached, Terry, we better start pulling backups…”

…at this point Jerry goes off for about 10 minutes, looking more and more wild eyed as he describes the total anarchy that is imminent before I jump back in…

“Jerry.  The server was hung.  The.cursor.would.not.move.   Couldn’t kill any processes, couldn’t start or stop services, and couldn’t gently restart it. You didn’t even know that we had an issue until we told you today. What exactly did you want us to do?

“I would have had you hard boot it”.

There was a time when every person in my IT department had a sign in their cube.  Two words were on the sign:

One Minute

The idea is simple and true.  One Minute can save you an hour or even a day’s worth of work.  Take a moment to take a deep breath and think about what you are about to do and more importantly why you are about to do it.  Does it still make sense?  Then go ahead and hit Enter sir.  It doesn’t?  Then go back to the drawing board. 

An IT infrastructure team faces an inordinate amount of pressure to keep things running.  The smallest, most seemingly benign change can have a major impact if not properly prepared for.  When things go wrong, the entire organization is standing at your desk, wanting to know what happened, what you’re doing about it, and when will it be fixed?  There’s a strong sense of urgency to every action in this scenario.  Taking a moment is the last thing that most people want to do.

But that is when it is most important to take that minute.  Pressure can make us take short cuts, make decisions that upon reflection are ill advised, and cause us an inordinate amount of clean up. 

We’re a society that revels in instant gratification and quick fixes, but we all know that slow, steady weight loss is better than a cram diet, that a made to order burger is better than a mass produced patty that contains a percentage of wood fiber in it (although neither really helps with the aforementioned diet), a custom made suit is better than one off the rack from JC Penny. 

Where does this lack of patience come from?  We’re accustomed to having everything at our fingertips, the latest Enter-The –Not-Quite-Celebrity-That-Is-Currently-All-Over-The News’s-Name-Here rumor readily available along with our thoughts and those of 10,000 of our closest friends, that pair of shoes can be here tomorrow with free shipping from Amazon Prime, our car telling us where the closest mass produced hamburger patty is.  I get it, and I readily admit that when a family member recently told me how he orders his toilet paper and paper towels on Prime so that he doesn’t have to go to the store I was all over it.

So all I’m asking for is One Minute. 

I’m not in any way saying that taking a minute will solve all your problems; indeed, there will always be situations that are untenable.  But taking One Minute can lead you to go with Bad Option B instead of Bad Option A, resulting in clean up but far less clean up than Bad Option A would have caused.  Similarly, a little bit of internal validation never hurts, right?  Bad Option A is in fact the only option, so let’s go for it.

Faced with a non-responsive email server and hordes of angry villagers no doubt beginning to form a mob complete with pitchforks, Terry and I took One Minute and did the unthinkable.  Jerry was able to externally validate our decision with far more time than we had to work with.  In the end, we were very lucky.  No loss, no corruption, and Jerry eventually started breathing normally again.  But looking back on it, that minute that we took made us both feel comfortable with the choice that we made, no matter what the outcome might have been. 

Next time you’re faced with a decision, take One Minute.  You’ll be glad that you did.