Today was a crazy day at the office. It started with a problem impacting business in the Netherlands due to a connectivity problem with a database hosted in the United States. One of my German colleagues received a call from the business and he told them he'd pass the info to me since it was a US problem and I happened to be sitting next to him.
I took a look and saw that one of my US colleagues had worked on the problem about an hour prior and everything was fine at that time. I then spent some time trying to figure out how to get in touch with this person at 2am US time. I was able to eventually reach them and they once again quickly corrected the issue. This made the business happy and allowed me to report success to my colleagues here.
Shortly after that I noticed a report of printer problems at two different production plants. This is a big deal because production impacts cost the company a LOT of money for each minute they are impaired. I had a pretty good idea of what the problem was from prior experience, but I knew I needed to check the right boxes before that team would accept the tickets to troubleshoot. Long story short, they were performing an upgrade. At the start of the upgrade they switched everyone to a backup server which wasn't as powerful. This created a backlog of print jobs which eventually filtered through...an hour later. Problem solved without any real action.
Then the big issue hit. The printer problem complaints reappeared, this time they were reporting the information on the printout was malformed which was completely stopping the production process. This was big. I looked for the German colleague who could assess the situation, but he was not available. I ended up finding someone from his team and sent them to get him to contact me. Once he did he indicated they switched to the new version of the printing software just before the problem reports started. He switched them back to the old version (a 10 minute process), and everything was fine. This ended up being a global problem and I had solved it and was now able to report that issue and resolution to management. Win-win!
After work I met up with a handful of US colleagues who are all here for various meetings for dinner. We walked to a restaurant in the "Old Town" section of Cologne right along the Rhine river. I had some very tasty gnocchi and enjoyed chatting with them and people watching. Two of them have been on special assignment to Germany for the last year or two. One of those colleagues was telling me about how she and a friend travel every weekend to a different country. Paris is 3 hours by train, Amsterdam is 3 hours by car, Barcelona is 2 hours by plane (round trip flights were 200 Euros this weekend).
After dinner we walked to an ice cream shop near the Cologne Cathedral. Another US colleague met us there and we sat and chatted until 10:30pm. It stays light here until almost 10pm! Tomorrow marks 2 weeks in Germany (well, two work weeks anyway) and I'm very happy to be here!
I took a look and saw that one of my US colleagues had worked on the problem about an hour prior and everything was fine at that time. I then spent some time trying to figure out how to get in touch with this person at 2am US time. I was able to eventually reach them and they once again quickly corrected the issue. This made the business happy and allowed me to report success to my colleagues here.
Shortly after that I noticed a report of printer problems at two different production plants. This is a big deal because production impacts cost the company a LOT of money for each minute they are impaired. I had a pretty good idea of what the problem was from prior experience, but I knew I needed to check the right boxes before that team would accept the tickets to troubleshoot. Long story short, they were performing an upgrade. At the start of the upgrade they switched everyone to a backup server which wasn't as powerful. This created a backlog of print jobs which eventually filtered through...an hour later. Problem solved without any real action.
Then the big issue hit. The printer problem complaints reappeared, this time they were reporting the information on the printout was malformed which was completely stopping the production process. This was big. I looked for the German colleague who could assess the situation, but he was not available. I ended up finding someone from his team and sent them to get him to contact me. Once he did he indicated they switched to the new version of the printing software just before the problem reports started. He switched them back to the old version (a 10 minute process), and everything was fine. This ended up being a global problem and I had solved it and was now able to report that issue and resolution to management. Win-win!
After work I met up with a handful of US colleagues who are all here for various meetings for dinner. We walked to a restaurant in the "Old Town" section of Cologne right along the Rhine river. I had some very tasty gnocchi and enjoyed chatting with them and people watching. Two of them have been on special assignment to Germany for the last year or two. One of those colleagues was telling me about how she and a friend travel every weekend to a different country. Paris is 3 hours by train, Amsterdam is 3 hours by car, Barcelona is 2 hours by plane (round trip flights were 200 Euros this weekend).
After dinner we walked to an ice cream shop near the Cologne Cathedral. Another US colleague met us there and we sat and chatted until 10:30pm. It stays light here until almost 10pm! Tomorrow marks 2 weeks in Germany (well, two work weeks anyway) and I'm very happy to be here!
Comments
Post a Comment