September 6, 2024 at 03:38AM
Each Friday, The Register features sober stories in its On Call column. This week, “Bob” shares his experience working for a stubborn boss at a private equity firm. Despite conflicting orders, Bob cleverly manipulated a fire drill to patch and reboot servers without interruption. The boss only learned about the outage years later during Bob’s exit interview.
Based on the meeting notes, the key takeaways are as follows:
1. Bob worked at a private equity firm where the owner made unreasonable demands, including insisting on 24/7 server operation during a fundraising campaign and conflicting instructions on server security patches.
2. Bob cleverly befriended the head of building services and used information obtained during a discussion over drinks to plan a server maintenance during a fire drill, ensuring minimal disruption to the office.
3. The boss remained unaware of the server outage for years until Bob disclosed it during his exit interview.
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