Mr Chrisitan... there be Mutiny aboard this ship (well, almost!!)

Picture the scene you have worked all the overtime your ship could muster ready for Christmas so you could give your family the festive period they deserve. Your face is aglow not only from the sea spray but knowing that as you hand your last time sheet to the boson, pay day is just before Christmas. You imagine all the Grog and Square Meals that will be consumed as you return to shore to be greeted by a smiling wife/partner, laden with presents for the kids looking forward to your well-deserved break. What a Hero.

But before that all happens you need your Time Sheet Data to reach the Accounts team to process all those Hour digits in to Pound digits and there lies the problem. Unbeknown to you the Time Sheet database failed 2 days ago and the data has become corrupted, unfortunately the last back up was in October not last Sunday as planned. Disaster has struck as the worst possible time no longer will you return to a Happy Smiling Partner whose face is now crimson red and has an expression of someone who is sucking on a two pence piece. The children want to know why there are no presents and already know from their mothers expression that Christmas is going to be an unhappy affair and that their friends will be asking ‘what did you get?’ and ‘how do you plug in a wooden horse’ and ‘where do the batteries go in a spinning top?’.

Luckily this painful scenario and the potential for mass munity was averted due to Team Managed Service Awesome at dsp. Once the issue was identified the team cranked in to operation. The Bulgarian team took up the baton at 8.30 a.m in the morning worked studiously throughout the day to when the American Team came online at 6.00pm. By 11.00 the problem was being shared and discussed from Oslo to the east coast of the United States with comments arriving from Manila at Midnight. A number of approaches were taken but our man in the states informed us that ‘we had options’ not just ‘an option’ where earlier in the day we had ‘no option’ as everything we had tried had failed or we had drawn a blank. The emails continued through the night in to the next morning still no good news just ticking off the boxes of things that didn’t work. With the great outpouring of technical heart ache eventually something would give and the team found the cutlass to strike at the heart of the problem.

After a solid 48 hours non-stop of blood, sweat and sea salty tears we emerged with a copy of the database and data intact so that the Payroll could proceed without delay hiding the fact that disaster was only a pay day away. The Jolly Roger was a hoisted up the mast of technical conquest and everyone joined in with a song about yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

So in summary we triumphed in the face of adversity, whilst the wind was taken out of our sails we blew back together stronger, we battened down our hatches and got on with job and in the end it was all plain sailing. Just another day in the DSP support team, a service empire on which the sun never sets 24*7.

Lucky for the sailors and all their Christmas’s were saved and they probably will never know how close they were to hearing those famous words ‘Mr Christian there be mutiny aboard this ship’.