I phone my dad yesterday, and tried to explain him how was my day while working as Tech Support on Saturdays. He was concerned for all those hours of work, as he knows I work Mon-Fri as well. I said, well, times flies so quickly you have no time to find out what time is it, plus you learn a lot, despite of how hectic things can be, you see lots of real life troubles and you have to find a solution even if you haven’t heard about the problem before.
I tried to explain him, well, people host their websites with us, some of them a pretty complex applications, they use who knows what scripts and we give support for about 4 programming languages, let alone three types of databases. The other day a customer was complaining his Ruby installation wouldn’t work, so boss said, Lizet, write a hello world program in Ruby and show him his installation is working. But boss! Ruby? all I’ve seen is a Ruby site with funny comics, and all I remember is the comics…You remember more than I do, so give it a try…Ok, hello world should always be easy.
I also had to debug some perl scripts for a customer or show him the lines with errors, I had to import several databases, watch for server overload a couple of times. It was fun Dad!
I haven’t mentioned my dad is a MD, and although he wouldn’t work “on call” anymore he used to make a shift a week when he was my age. In the fam we all know more than a story about it. He replied: “It seems to me you’re working on an emergency room”
Hrm, I said, yup, I suppose it feels the same 🙂