Flying to Pakistan.

In the action-packed field of Information Technology, technicians and engineers improve business productivity, do more with less, occasionally break down the very nature of time and space, and sometimes, we learn about flying to Pakistan.

My morning began with a phone call at 6:13 am. It was a wrong number, technically, and I said as much, but the caller insisted in pursuing his line of questioning. You see, there was a time when I had done some consulting for a few companies in the Lower Mainland and my cell phone number is in the Rolodex of a number of executive assistants and harried office managers. So anyway, this morning, 6:13, the phone call.

"Our networks are down and I need you to come in and fix them."

This is not the sort of early morning greeting one would like to receive, especially from a guy named Tony.

I tried the easy out first, "Sorry chief, you've got the wrong number."

Tony was not to be deterred. "Aren't you that guy who fixed our network back in the summer 0f 2005?"

I was committed to the "wrong number" route at this point and saw no reason to change course. I ended the call firmly, but politely and got ready for work.

My real job is a good one, I work for a great company in a fun industry that in many ways, is like putting a fat kid in charge of a cake factory - let your imagination run wild. The problem is that in this fast-paced industry, priorities change like gas prices and that project that wasn't due till November is suddenly needed yesterday. In this case, it was the damn disk array, six and a half terabytes of fiber optic-connected storage that a team of engineers, artists, and finance professionals would need to store their content, documents, and videos of cats doing amusing things. Typically, this would take a month to get working, but instead it was up and running in about the time it would take to fly to Pakistan.

After thirty hours of being locked in the server room, it is 8:52 on Wednesday morning, I'm on my second cup of coffee and watching the blinking lights of our new disk array pulse and flicker and hopefully, not crash.

I'm Just Ben.