After writing up the post about Chicken Little Syndrome, I had flash backs to an earlier time when I worked with this bloke Yosemite Sam who had a bad case of Rebootitis.  The first thing you have to understand is that the guy really did look like Yosemite Sam, mustache and all.  Now that you have him pictured in your head I can begin to explain how he would continually hunt rabbits and be affected by Rebootitis.

I first started working at this company who, when using the Joel Test, scored an amazing 0 (if only I’d forced the test on them prior to taking the job).  Okay, maybe they got 1/2 a point, but I’ll post about that later.  When I started at this place I shared an office with Yosemite Sam.  For the first week or so I was rather busy trying to keep my head above the water (first day: Here’s 40 reports we need modified. You can find the database on the network) so I didn’t really notice that Yosemite was ducking out of the office regularly.  After a while I’d be working on said reports and all of a sudden I’d have database connectivity errors popping up all over the place.  I chalked it up to networking issues as the email server was in a constant state of flux at the same time (again another post will have to cover networking at this joint).

Eventually I started to notice that there was a correlation between Yosemite’s office departures and the appearance of database connection errors in Crystal Reports.  Being a curious individual I followed him out on one of his journeys.  He left our office, walked into the server room (yes open to all, and yes to be covered in a future post) and proceeded to hard boot the server.  Yep, just walk up to it and push the power button.  Wait for the noise to stop coming from it, and then push the button to start it all back up again.  Turns out this was also the email server (explains it’s stability), the domain controller, the development SQL Server machine, marketing’s Maximizer server and the print server.  So Yosemite Sam was rebooting the entire company a number of times each day.

Being a newbie I didn’t say anything (why rock the boat when you’re the one without a life vest?) and carried on my merry way.  Finally a couple of weeks later I was debugging some code with Yosemite and when it started to return results he didn’t expect he pipes up with “Hang on.  I’ll go reboot the server.  It’ll fix this.”  Turns out it was just a bug in the client side code, but hey, rebooting the server should fix anything.

I’m the Igloo Coder and I’m just flipping the light switch waiting for the TV reception to get better.