Online/Offline Dreams

Before you go on to ask me anything more on the weird topic of this post, it would definitely help you to know something about the geek in me. My musings as a programmer were recorded in my first blog here rajivmohapatra.blogspot.com

After I finished my bachelor's degree in engineering I went on to be a software engineer designing mainframe systems for Fortune 500 BFSI clients. I have a habit of taking my work very very personally. Sometimes so personally that I design entire program modules in dreams and many lines of code start appearing in my dreams.

This particular dream happened on one fateful day when I was supposed to be running the mainframe batch streams for the general housekeeping jobs to keep the data environment in good shape. The archaic age-old systems that mainframes are, most of the systems and programs were written and maintained long before I materialised on planet earth. Every technology that my engineering books termed outdated and my teachers refrained from delving deep into, appeared to be very much the lifeline of the global financial world and of my worklife as well. Infact relational databases which appeared as early as the 1970s were not dominantly used in the client's systems. The hierarchial IMS-DB databases that I had to mess with had a unique characteristic. In the Online mode during the day people have access to the data-stores where as in the Offline batch mode(mostly in the night and early morning) only the programs and jobs have access to data.

I was assigned to arrive early in the morning and run the offline batch streams successfully to completion after which the data environments would be online for the day. However it so happened that some developer had managed to screw the data and my job-runs were unsuccessful. After a lot of hullabaloo it was decided to abandon the job-runs in the half-run states before the data environment went online. Needless to say my entire day went on pondering as to how could things have turned out perfect.

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Time - 3.15 am Indian Standard Time

All the batch streams flash before my eyes. I see a humongous number of batch jobs running on the screen and suddenly all of them abend(whenever a job does not complete successfully its termed an ABnormal ENDing or abend). And in the next second another flash
ALL ENVIRONMENTS ARE ONLINE

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Man what a nightmare. And as I lay in my bed, I keep pondering, why couldn't I find any solution for it. Needless to say, I never had any nightmare with such tenacity before. And however hard I tried to sleep afterwards I could not sleep. Eventually I read a book and as the clock showed 6 am I went on to get prepared for office, who knows what lays in store for me in the day ahead, maybe I will find a solution to my problem.

Starting on a brand new day...