Momentary Brilliance

So, I get this call on Friday morning, my boss asking if I can use OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder). Well, yeah. I did a huge project using an earlier version of the tool, I could probably figure out the newer one without too much problem. I figured he was looking for some project proposal analysis, or something.

Nope. A new client called with a Serious Production Issue -- they had lost connectivity and were absolutely frantic that htey couldn't do their data loads from ther old system into their data warehouse. Could I come out for a few hours and fix it?

Gaah! I hate that kind of gig. You have to come in, get up to speed, and be a gold-plated expert in two hours or less. There are technologies that I'm perfectly happy to do this for, but Warehouse Builder is not one of them. Not any more. I haven't touched it for a year. The salesperson on the gig had told them that we could send someone "today", but I really wanted a bit of time to refresh myself on the tool.

So I blithely told the client on the phone that I had client responsbilities for the rest of the afternoon and I'd be there first thing Monday morning, without waiting for the sales person to get a word in edgewise. WHile it was a production environment, there was ONE user and she was out. Ha!

In the end, I was there for less than two hours and things were back up and running, and the person I was helping was actually pleased that I'd not come on Friday. If it had been fixed on Friday afternoon, she would have had to work all weekend. I told her this was part of the well-rounded services that TUSC provides.

I got to feel momentarily brilliant, but then I had to go back home and feel inadequate and dense while trying to decipher the code in the application I'm supposed to re-engineer. Sigh.