oh no NOT that BUTTON

Well,

I would love to tell you that things are going great at Stryker - which for the most part I guess they are... but I am learning that when you work in a job where you have lots of responsibility over the equipment that keeps the business running - you also have a lot of visibility when you make a mistake. (also known as don't make mistakes)

I remember when I decided to play soccer, Mr. Poveda used to say that the offense could make mistakes, the midfielders could make mistakes, the defense really shouldn't make mistakes and the goalie (Traci) was not allowed any mistakes.

Should've gotten used to it because that's exactly what it is like at work. Last week on Friday I was celebrating a great week after I fixed a problem that had really been bothering us. Then a contractor called and needed an address for a piece of equipment he was going to add to our network.

Let me digress a little - the backbone of a network is a bunch of switches, (shown in the picture above) these switches are what all the computers, phones and equipment plug into to get connections to the network. The switches are very important as they contain the configuration for the network and tell the computers and other things how to get the information they need so the computers work. We probably have 40 or so of these switches in the 4 buildings I am responsible for.

Ok so back to the contractor - he needs an address... well, on the front of one of these switches there is a button - the button is labeled MODE

You can see the MODE button on the left hand side it is small and black... anyway the little words above the button are status lights - for example when you have multiple switches connected together you push that button and it tells you which switch is switch #1 switch #2 etc. So I asked the contractor to push the button and tell me which switch he was plugging his equipment into. As far as I knew at that point that is the only thing that button could do.

SO - he pressed the button, except he held it down instead of pushing and letting go and he deleted the entire configuration that was stored in the switch. Of course no one even our CISCO contractor knew that button was capable of that! SO.. needless to say, I spend the entire day Friday reconfiguring the switch while everyone in that entire building stood around because they could no longer work.... this was not my idea of fun and no one was impressed... I had to fill out a report explaining what happened... under root cause of the problem I put Traci asked the contractor to push a button. Everyone loved that - under resolution - NO MORE BUTTON PUSHING!

So anyway - live and learn - but my new resolve is to go back to the good old days of playing soccer goalie - no mistakes no mistakes - please don't kick the ball at me - no mistakes no mistakes...