Always on Call
It’s the curse of the high level network engineer… To always be on call. Because your job requires you to engineer mission critical and company wide networks, no matter how well you document (or how well you forget to document due to your extreme lack of time) your network, something will always go wrong, and you will get a call/page. So the object is to engineer the network to a point that it’s simple to maintain. I call it the Drunken Master network engineering technique.
Imagine, you’re over at a friends house party, which happens to feature 12 different brands of Vodka and whatever you wish to mix with it. (My friend Matt says if you mix anything more than ice with it, it’s an insult to the Vodka, but I’m all about making my Vodka angry with me; an angry Vodka tends to get one drunker faster). Now, you’ve had quite a few drinks, and at about 1:45am, you get a page… The network is down and it’s impacting customers. What do you do? You know you can’t call on anyone else; they can’t fix anything and will probably make things worse. You can’t call your boss; he’ll just keep asking “Is it fixed yet? How about now?”. This is why you engineered your network to the Drunken Master technique. Your network is so simple, you can fix it and troubleshoot it three sheets to the wind.
You get on the router, fix the Ospf issue (Damn, you forgot to set the DR priority correctly), and go back to having your brain smashed out by a golden brick wrapped by a lemon.
Woe be the network engineer that makes his network unnecessarily complicated; No partying for You!
