Technology

At 12:30 a.m. on the Fourth of July, system administrator pilot fish gets a page from his company's outsourcer: A remote execution job is down, and the error message says it can't connect to the remote server.

So fish gets online and pings his server, but it's OK. He logs on: OK. Checks daemons: OK. "Nothing seems to be wrong," says fish. "So I restart the job and check it out."

For five minutes, fish watches as remote job runs without incident. Then he logs off and goes back to bed.

But fish's head barely hits the pillow before he gets another page. "Your job died again," outsourcer tech tells him.

Fish climbs out of bed again and repeats his troubleshooting process. Once again, everything looks OK until it mysteriously dies. Must mean it's time to call the database administrator to recycle the database, he figures.