Work, life & flickering lights

Photo by Andrii Babarytskyi on Unsplash

Disclaimer: Some parts of this are true and some, fictitious. Some deep contemplations and some exaggerations. But none in any intention to offend anyone. These thoughts are ones that I learnt across my work all the years.

It was 2130 in the night. I was on my bed, staring at the small light in the ceiling wondering if it served its purpose or was it just to blind my vision and force me to turn to my side. But the side I slept on did not matter. I could still hear the rapids. The close distance and the gurgling sound of water as it unapologetically made its way through rocks and boulders. It was soothing.

For close to three weeks, I was living by the laps of the Ganges, the mighty River. I was on something called a work-cation. But if you knew me, you would know it was more of work and less of a (va)cation. Despite having taken a resolution to do much better at work-life harmony, every night was an unsuccessful attempt to sleep early. To make matters worse, it felt like the flickering light above was my nemesis and was challenging my resolution further. It always won.

When you are a workaholic, you make a lot of excuses. Starting from ‘there is a critical release’, to ‘hey this is a new project’ to ‘my manager is a pain’. But seldom on the lines of ‘I enjoy my work’, ‘I find this fascinating’ or ‘I get to learn a lot’. These excuses are not just for others. Soon you start telling this to yourself too because, at one point, your logical brain starts to call out that you are ruining your health and relationships and then you try to convince yourself with, ‘hey just one release more’.

I had no one else to blame. I had a great team. There were no longer late nights and broken builds. Yet rather than exploring the holy city of Rishikesh, I chose to send one final email, in an infinite loop.

Unbeknownst to myself, I fell asleep much earlier that night. A deep slumber with the light on. A victory over my challenger, when I was suddenly woken up by a ring. I seldom get calls that late in the night unless it was an emergency or ……

Hey D, sorry to wake you up so late. This is K here.

Still groggy, I replied Hey K, no issues. What’s up?

We have a production issue. Our systems are down.

Eyes still closed, I said, Give me a min. I’ll connect.

It was 0045. Emergency rescue mode kicked in and I woke up and set everything as though this was something I did every day. It was not. Zoom was the channel, and I connected with K. He gave me a quick overview. Our production system was not reachable. Events were not flowing to it and our application was not usable. This is classified as a priority1(P1) severity in terms of severities of issues on production. P1 is what warrants waking someone from a coma if it came to that. All that we knew from the client teams that the systems were not usable and were blind to everything else as we did not have access. We were still waiting for the other teams to respond to our distress signal.

In less than 15 min and after half a dozen phone calls, we had all the dependent teams on call. These random issues in the middle of the night are always the mysterious ones. You have to debug, analyse and find the quickest and safest patch to bring the system back up. And that’s what we began doing. With multiple queries into the database to try and figure out what state the system was in, to talking to the client teams about if something had changed, we were trying to find ways to bring the system back to normalcy. Hopes that this would be an intermittent issue and that we could soon go to sleep were silently persistent in the back of everyone’s head. That night wasn’t the lucky one though. I looked back at the light above and said this was your doing.

Close to an hour of downtime, we concluded that the only way to bring it back up was to change the core state of the application. We would do the RCA later when brains were more awake. Changing the core state was a simple matter of two database queries. Glad that we were close to wrapping this call, we proposed it to the client. If only life were that easy. The clients needed approval from the business users who were in the US timezone.

Alright, let’s get it then, I told the client service teams who soon went on mute.

What do we do until then? A asked.

I guess……We wait.

During working hours, this would be the ideal situation. Grab a cup of coffee, chat away with friends, play a game of Catan, or anything.

But the enthusiasm isn’t the same when it is dark outside. There is silence around except for the occasional tossing around of your partner or the snoring of your dog, you wish you could wait in an alternate universe but that in this, you could be asleep inside the cosy blanket. I sensed K wasn’t joyed at our situation then. He knew we did not have a lot of options but the chosen option didn’t have to make him happy. That time I realised a few critical things

- It’s a boon to have folks in your team who understand the criticality of a situation and are willing to pitch in when the situation really demands for it.

- Even if someone signed up for it, one must ensure that it is not taken for granted. When you are in the front line of handling frustrated clients, having the team to back up is a huge added advantage.

- The ‘sense’ of the urgency of a problem statement is inversely proportional to the amount of sunlight outside your window. The approval from the business users took longer than I expected. They were away for lunch while I was waiting under the flickering light with other folks in awkward zoom call with all muted participants.

- The biggest thing I realised, this mode isn’t sustainable in the long run. Something had to change drastically. I had to change somethings for both myself and the team

With nothing to do but stay mute on the call, I decided to do something I had not done in the previous weeks that I was in Rishikesh. I decided to head out on a walk into the streets. With a jacket in tow and earphones on, I locked the door and stepped out.

The streets were scary. It had no human for as far as I could see. Some dogs who stared back at me with the same surprise that I had. I am sure we shared the same thought of the insanity I was portraying. They did not even bother barking. Things were eerily silent in the zoom call as well. Perhaps everyone was questioning the purpose of their life as I was.

I walked by the streets looking at different shops with the shutters down. A city looks pleasantly different in the wee hours of the night. You are not distracted by the vibrant colours of things hanging out, you are not encouraged to buy that shawl which the shopkeeper claims you would never find anywhere else in the world, you are not tempted to stop for that Pani Puri, most importantly you did not have to wade through folks and vehicles to avoid crashing into them. In those hours, it was just the invisible me. And of course the zoom call that continued.

As I walked on, I noticed that my nerves had calmed down. I was still concerned about K being up at that time but I understood that the ones we were waiting for surely would get back asap. As soon as their possible. Perhaps this is why it is critical to take breaks. It helps you gain better control of the situation because the trivial gets diluted. After all, isn’t everything a state of the mind?

Not very clear but I saw yellow lights at a distance in vertical lines. Curious at what they may be, I egged forward to reach the base of the famous suspension bridge, Laxman Jhula (Laxman swing)

I held my jacket tighter. It was just past 2 in the morning and I was walking alone on a suspension bridge connected to my team who were probably in a world of their own, waiting to hear back from users from across the world only on if we can go ahead and click that one button.

As I walked on the swaying bridge, I realised the winds that night were stronger than the other evenings I had accidentally ventured out. I say accidentally because every time I planned, I never stuck to it and I always said just one more email, just one more call. And then it would just be one more day. I looked down at the mighty usually calm river below me. She no longer looked calm. The winds gave her the freedom to roar her voice out. She moved fast and it wasn’t a comforting sight. I was scared at my wit’s end. On a bridge which rocked and into the water which now looked vengeful. The one thought that crossed my head, If I had to fall right now, I do hope they find the RCA of the bug that caused this. I crossed the bridge safely. However little did I know then, that this was the prelude to the crack of the glacier at Chamoli that took with it, tens of people, just a week later.

As I sat by the steps of the ghat close to 0230 am, a few things dawned upon me,

• We all rush behind work as much to get it done but seldom wonder what is the point of the rush. There is always going to be that ‘just one more email, just one more call’ but there isn’t going to be another full moon night that month, or another cold wind flying around or that game with your daughter. Does that mean we quit and go on a trip? Perhaps yes, if that is what you want to do. But that is not what I meant. The key is balance. To learn to balance that you need to work when you are working but you also need to NOT work when you are not working.
• In the journey of handling all the tactical issues, we were missing out on the strategic plays. The Pareto principle was perfect to point out to me that I should not be targeting who will be awake the next night to fix the issue but instead how can we work towards not needing to stay awake.
• One’s time is limited. So is one’s energy. One must choose wisely about where one spends their energy. There is no point in getting worked up upon a tough client’s vindictive email. The energy is better spent in brainstorming techniques to mellow them down.
• Is it just a trait of our Indian work style, that we are ok to pitch in at any point in time? Have we taken ‘our culture of hospitality’ a little too far by making it ok to expect folks to be available across all hours?
• Another revelation made me laugh in amusement. I realised how one minor mistake, or lapse or ‘ah chalta hai’ in the left end of the software lifecycle can result in a sleepless night of close to 6 folks. And then when I started to think of the major disasters in history. From launch failures to dam cracks., if you look at it, it will all boil down to one simple thing. There was no comfort in discovering that the cause of a disastrous event was but one simple thing, which could have been avoided, if only…….
• My most important and insightful revelation was that I should definitely get a thicker jacket.

As I continued to sit there and watch the river flow, I also realised that these things have to change. Not just for my benefit but for the benefit of the folks I work with or conventionally that is called ‘manage’. Why is India rated as one of the most overworked workforces? Why are we ok to live with ’chalta hai’. Why am I always in the mode of ‘just one more email…..’

No, I had not abandoned my dear colleague or the other folks. The zoom call was still on. But as these realisations dawned upon me, the only thought was that our strategies must change, our approach must change, my working style must change. We are setting ourselves up for a faster burnout if we begin to accept that this is the only way. This cannot be. I was sure we could think of other ways.

When you step up from a problem statement and realise it has a solution, there is a sense of positivity that engulfs you. You suddenly think you can climb Mount Everest, or swim across the banks of the river Ganges at 0300 in the morning. Thankfully rationale prevails then and you choose against making that dive into the Ganges.

As though the stars aligned, K called out to me on the call and said he found the issue. The quick fix for the issue was very simple and we did not have to wait for the business users to confirm as it wouldn’t change the core state. The next decision did not take much time. A final go and our sister team at TechOps made the change and voila, all systems were back up. Once the client service team confirmed all was ok, it was time to get back to sleep.

‘The host had now ended the call’

I walked back again on the suspension bridge, marveling at how people lived so dangerously on the cliff. As I think of it today, I send my condolences to those who were impacted by the Glacier breakdown that followed.

Solving a P1 issue also has a feel-good factor. But I was more content that the team was now back to their slumber. As I climbed the stairs and walked down the deserted path, I realised that I had seen more of this city in an unexpected time across midnight in the wee hours only because I was in a production issue. If not, perhaps I would have never had the fortune of being a lone traveler in the streets of a crowded city of Rishikesh, India. Work has also brought me good stuff and that is something I must not forget.

In all, it was a good evening/night/morning. With loads of learnings and new tactics, new strategies and newer motivations, some experiences, and definitely a new memory. I felt content about how things had turned, some sort of a win. I turned my key with a smile knowing tonight was a night of win. Until my eyes fell on my nemesis, the flickering light above which unceremoniously gloated ’It is 0400 and you are still awake. Checkmate’.

Lights off.