Hell

Reunion Island is great but life is different when nothing is going right at work.



My work is fairly simple, I have to setup different types of machines and have them talk to each other. The reality is of course quite complex and you really see it when those nice machines decide not to do what they are supposed to. I came back to Reunion Island to increase the capacity and the features of the machines, to do so I need to upgrade the software they use. This type of operation usually occur at night when most customers are sleeping and are not using their phones. I often start working around 11 PM, end up in bed around 3 or 4 AM if I am lucky and much later if I am not.



Things usually go like this:
we get to the workplace
we check that everything is working well (this way if something is not working afterwards we know that it is our doing)
we do whatever needs to be done
we check that everything is still working well
if there is no issue we go home
if there is something wrong we try to find a solution
if we haven't found anything around 5 PM we undo whatever we did hoping the issue will disappear
if the issue is still there once we are back to the way things were before then we are screwed
Issues usually occur a few seconds after modifications have been done but they can sometime be sneaky.



One day a problem occurred 21 hours after our modifications. In this case I have the pleasure of spending my evening on the phone and in front of my laptop to try and bring everything back to normal.
A customer once complained but was unable to tell us when his issue started (knowing when an issue first occurred helps us compare with the modifications we did on that day). We tried to reproduce what was described by the customer but weren't successful, in this case this means for us that the customer doesn't know how to use his phone. The customer kept on complaining but we would still not be able to reproduce his problem. In the end the customer was right to insist, he was the only one with the problem and we would have never seen anything if not for him.
The thing I like best is getting emails after working during the night where I would find diagrams showing how everything was great before and how it was all bad since I changed some things. In some cases it becomes so bad that I can't even wait till the night to change everything back but mostly I am good for another night to erase the previous nights work.
The crown goes to the change that will create 3 or 4 different problems and give the impression of originating from different machines. With this one you get long nights in front of the laptop coupled with lengthy emails and phone calls to explain those who are supposed to help you what you did before trouble started.



It is great once things calm down. It was to a point where everybody was coming to us when there was an issue even if it was not related and we were starting to doubt everything we were doing. After 2 hard months things are back to normal and I have more energy to enjoy the beach.

La suite!

Pedal

I went for a bike ride a few days ago that I will never forget it.



We left at 7 in the morning to get to “la route du volcan”. Once on the road, we left the car halfway to our destination and started riding the bikes. The weather was nice, the top of “le piton des neiges” was not yet covered with clouds, I was wearing an extra jacket because it was cold. The bike ride started with an easy pace, I tried not to go too fast because I knew that we had quite a long way to go and I wanted to keep my strength. I found out that I started having difficulties as soon as the road tilt reached a certain level. I was riding my bike while being on the fourth speed of the bike in the middle plateau but I quickly found myself on the first speed in the largest plateau. I was not used to riding a bike for long distances, I tried to ride as slow as possible to not tire my legs too fast: I was going so slow at some point that I had a hard time going straight.



My legs were hurting so much in the hairpins that I had to stop at each curve to rest. I gave myself goals to reach during the ride to help me go forward. The few times I have been on a bike I was either riding in Paris or going down “le Maido” on a mountain bike. I felt a great deal of satisfaction when I reached “le pas de sable”, there were only a few hairpins left separating me from the place I like the most on this earth: “la plaine des sables”. We had a short boomerang session, it was everything I needed to relax after the suffering. Throwing boomerangs in “la plaine des sables” is the third thing I like to do most on this island after scuba diving and mountain bike hiking. I caught the boomerang twice, lets hope I will catch it even more next time. We concluded the bike ride to reach “le pas de bellecombe”, we were on a dirt road and had to breathe all the dust that each car passing us by was raising while we were avoiding potholes.



The way back was easier as there was more down than up but the climb up from “la plaine des sables” was tough. The ride to “le pas de bellecombe” had killed my legs and I didn’t have the energy to climb that kind of road without stopping to rest at each curve. I found out on the way back that I could actually ride without any problems when the tilt of the road was light but my strength went very fast when the tilt increased. When I was speeding down the road I couldn’t stop myself saying: I rode all that up! The clouds started to gather and a light drizzle started that was quite refreshing. Of course the drizzle turned into rain and I had to slow down to avoid getting out of the road. The change of the strength in the rain made me feel like I had stepped through an invisible door. I was feeling like I was close to the end of the ride and remembered that we had started with a slope, the ride had to end with a rise! I remembered the rise to be short but it just wouldn’t stop, I don’t remember how many times I had to stop to relax my legs. At some point I think I even stopped every 5 or 10 kicks.
I eventually reached our starting point, the whole ride was 32km long and had roughly 300 meters of positive elevation.

La suite!

My Sound Of The Day

Time to support someone I know and think is very talented: Thibaut Renard - Let's Have This. You can follow him here.



La suite!