Leavers and believers is a response in the Times-Picayune to an article that the New York Times ran about a week ago.

While my trip to Dallas was very stressful, short, loud, and amazingly hot, there were a few things that I think are a little funny in retrospect.

During my ‘tour’ of the datacenter, my guide pointed out, “This is our NOC [Network Operactions Center] and it’s up 24/7.” That’s great and all, but either 24/7 in Dallas means 7 to 5 or she was referring to the fact that the room and equipments stays intact all day long (only the staffing and lights are on for a small portion of that time).

The other fun experience I had was in the courtesy room that was setup for people working in the datacenter to get out of the loud room and work or take phone calls. Amazingly this is the only room in the entire building where my cell phone didn’t work, but at least they had a VoIP phone for us to use. Anyway, two of the most unhelpful and not terribly bright guys were there working on their servers (although I think one was working and the other was just tagging along). Anyway, they had taken the only two chairs in the room. I was at first more worried getting connected because the datacenter didn’t actually power most of the ethernet drops – really big help. Once I was all settled, they just left, but also left their laptops. Being the nice guy I am, instead of taking one of their chairs, I went around to the lobby and asked nicely if I could borrow another chair. So I was given a slightly nicer chair and I went back to work. I then had to go check on a connection on one of our servers really quickly, so I left my computer and everything for maybe 5 minutes. When I came back one of the guys had switched chairs with me. What an asshole! The good news is I guess I got him back a hour later when I jumped onto a conference call with the VoIP phone and he suddenly needed to be on the phone. I was on the conference for the next hour and a half, by which time he and his partner were leaving anyway.

I’m in Dallas for a really short trip to help out in one of our colocations. I arrived at my hotel and politely waited in line since there were people at the counter being helped. It was extremely obvious that I was waiting. Two people walk in at the same time and go right up to the counter and push before me. They both saw me, but felt that they were more important. It felt like I was in France.