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It was 3am, and the baby woke up. I'm tired, he's tired, I envision that we just want to work this out and get him back to sleep. After a few minutes of trying to soothe him back to sleep, he begins chewing on his pacifier, biting down and ripping the pacifier out like he was a T-Rex tearing flesh off a hapless brontosaur. Anyone who's been a parent knows that sign. The teething woke him up. So, problem known, I take steps to resolve it. I give him some liquid Tylenol, hold the arm that was ripping the pacifier out with one hand, and hold the pacifier in with the other. Sitting in a rocker, thus posed I begin to rock him gently, waiting for the Tylenol to give him enough relief that he can go back to sleep, and singing to him quietly in that voice only your very own baby could love. The next thing I know, the pacifier is on the floor, his free hand has my bottom lip and is doing his best to rip it off to use as a teething toy, and he is telling me in no uncertain terms (and telling his sister and mother who were sleeping, and a couple of neighbors, and some people in Detroit, and a couple of people with good hearing in Hong Kong...) that while he is grateful for my care in soothing his teething pain, that did nothing for his belly.This fact is clearly indicated by the sudden and uninterrupted movement of his behind while he is making noises like a dying rhinoceros. My apologies to those people in Detroit and Hong Kong. This is the point (after an hour of dealing with the problem 'successfully') that Lori walked into the baby's room and ordered me to bed - with the implied "you incompetent" in her half-awake voice. Interesting how I couldn't pull that off with her. This sounds completely unrelated, but it's not. You see, the same thing can happen when choosing technological solutions. Solving one problem to uncover one you weren't aware of. I know of at least one case where a server in a startup with steadily increasing workload was thrown behind a load balancer to resolve the problem, only to discover that it didn't. The reality was that the server was compromised, and the steadily increasing workload wasn't proof of the success of the site it hosted after all. The load balancing probably confused the attackers for a bit, but since all that work was moved off of their server, now it was a very efficient platform for launching attacks. Of course, this caused the IT Admin in question to look deeper and find the problem. Without the dying rhinoceros noises, but through the same type of process. The moral of the story is twofold - first, do your research. The obvious problem may not be the only problem. Second, keep an open mind. When presented with facts that say your chosen solution isn't completely resolving the problem, act to find out why before someone wants to know why IT is once again failing to solve their problems. Because you, like me, can't pull off the recrimination thing. IT being a service industry, is always in the wrong if things aren't going right. Don. /Reading: (NSFW Warning - vulgarity) The Baby Volume, which was half the inspiration for this post (the other half "just came to me" at 3 this morning). If you have ever been a parent of a baby, you will laugh until people want to know what's so funny. If you are now the parent of a baby, you'll cry about the same amount ;-). *This story is based on two true stories in the sense that a Hollywood movie is based on a true story.
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