Poor SysAdmin was run ragged this past weekend, what with a major upgrade (to a new server) landing on a regularly scheduled maintenance weekend. Come Sunday, a scheduled SQL job had not fired off on the new system, and with SysAdmin trying to catch some well-earned shut-eye, Alpha-Geek stepped in.
When Alpha-Geek is scratching his head, you know there's trouble. But eventually most gremlins were run to ground. It might have been lingering guilt for grilling me about an oversight that turned out to be his, but A-G surprised me by thanking me for "all [my] hard work." The way I see it, I was just doing my duty to "my" application--that's just the flip-side of the autonomy. So I duly thanked him for giving a chunk of his Sunday--freshly arrived from a business jaunt out of town, no less--to working out the remaining kinks in the new system. "There's no substitute for having the person who knows where all the bodies are buried," I IM'd--or something to that effect.
"I just hold the up the light so others can dig," quoth A-G.
Which, I suppose, is the description of an Alpha-Geek's job in the proverbial nutshell. Not a bad thing for an average geek to want to be when s/he grows up.
