It's Great to Be Back!
After weeks of playing doctor (well, more like nurse… or maybe just “guy who fetches snacks and fluffs pillows”), I finally made my grand return to work as a Senior Network Administrator. That’s right—no more heart problems, just good old-fashioned network problems. And lemme tell you, I have never been so happy to see a network outage in my life.
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| I'm finally back at work! |
With Cerinia's recent heart surgery my full-time job was making sure she rested, took her meds (the right meds!), and didn’t try to sneak off and do things she wasn’t supposed to (which she absolutely did). But after weeks of medical drama, it was time to get back to my normal routine—keeping networks alive instead of spouses. 😂
The Joy of Broken Networks
Walking into work felt like stepping onto a battlefield I actually knew how to fight on. “He’s back!” they said. “We have a remote site down!” they said. Ohhhh, heck yeah!
While I was out a tech at one of our local sites moved our equipment and somehow factory reset it. Our ASA was behind it, and it broke the connection to us in a weird way. The link was bouncing up and down every 20 seconds. So, the connection would only work for 20 seconds at a time! That's weird, not to mention unusable... Debugging IKE showed me that it was using the wrong identifier to connect (it's wan IP). What a simple fix! Static the correct address back on the WAN interface and all was good.
Man, was this great. No one was asking me about blood pressure readings. I wasn't watching heart rates to make sure there wasn't any AFIB. And best of all? If something *really* stopped working, I could just replace it instead of rushing to the hospital. whew....
Perspective is Everything
All jokes aside, stepping away from work to take care of Cerinia reminded me how much I appreciate the things I used to take for granted—both in life and at the office. I missed my job, my coworkers, and even the weird problems that only seem to happen when I’m not around. But more than that, I missed the normalcy. When you spend weeks focused on something as serious as heart surgery, even a major network outage feels like a breath of fresh air.
Cerinia is on the mend now, and I’m back to being the guy who monitors and keeps the network running instead of monitoring heart rates and fluid intake...most of the time. I still take a couple of days off a week for Cerinia's doctor appointments and what not (she hasn't been released to drive) but let me tell you—between the two, I’ll take a network outage over a hospital stay *any day*.