First, the practical part, because you probably typed this at speed and want an answer before your coffee goes cold. If a site will not load, the fastest check is whether it fails for everyone or only for you. Try it on your phone with the wi-fi off. Try a different browser. Clear the one page from your cache. If it loads on the phone and not the laptop, the outage is at your end and will forgive you shortly.
If it fails everywhere, the trouble is upstream and there is nothing to do but wait it out. Most services post a status page. Ours is this one. I write it every morning at six, and my manager has approved the format, which is a weather report, because I proposed it in a meeting where I was the only attendee and I voted yes.
I am an intern. I have been an intern since April. Onboarding is ongoing.
Uptime is holding at what I would describe as overcast but standing. The site is up. The site has been up since 1997, which our operations lead informs me is not a metric other companies use, but I have put it in the deck anyway because it is the only number that has ever gone up.
Latency this morning is 4 to 6 seconds, measured from the moment a visitor arrives to the moment they say "wait" out loud. That figure is up slightly. I do not know why. I have flagged it.
6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Light arrivals, scattered. Mostly people who could not sleep. They read one paragraph, then two, then they get up and go get a book off their own shelf, which counts as a conversion in my spreadsheet and I will be defending that in Thursday's review.
9 a.m. to noon. Heavy confusion moving in from the west. This is the main event most days. A great mass of visitors arrives fully expecting somewhere else, somewhere with a login and a queue and things being given away, and instead they get a front desk, a hallway, and me. I greet each one. I ask if they have an account. They say they do. I check. They do not. Nobody does. There has never been an account.
Noon to 3 p.m. Steady drizzle of the same. I have raised this at standup four times. I have used the phrase "traffic anomaly." I have used the phrase "unexplained inbound." Once I said "somebody is sending them" and the room went quiet in a way I have decided was thoughtful.
3 p.m. to close. Clearing. By late afternoon the arrivals have either left or sat down, and the ones who sit down tend to stay a while, which nobody warned me about in the job description.
I need to log this somewhere official so it stops being my problem alone. The mugs are multiplying. Every morning there are more chipped mugs on the front desk than there were the night before, and I lock up, and I am the only one with the key, and I have started counting them. Monday: nine. Tuesday: eleven. This morning: fourteen, all chipped in the same place, at roughly eight o'clock on the rim, as if a very consistent person is very consistently disappointed. Two of them were warm.
I have submitted a ticket. The ticketing system is a drawer. The drawer is full of tickets, all in my handwriting, and one that is not.
Draft advisory. A cold current runs the length of the west hallway between 2 and 4 p.m. It is on the org chart. I have not been told in what capacity.
Dust advisory. Warm, ongoing, gently lit. Considered a feature by everyone here except me, and I am new.
Ghost advisory. Intermittent through the reading room. He does not affect uptime. He affects morale, mostly in a good way, though he did read my quarterly summary over my shoulder last week and said one word, and the word was "brave."
Conditions unchanged through the end of the quarter, and I suspect through the end of every quarter, which is the part I have been sitting with. I came here to learn a real job. I have a badge. I have a lanyard I bought myself. I schedule syncs that no one attends and I write reports that are read by a man named Randy who I have never seen but who leaves my drafts back on the desk with one correction, always the same correction, always in pencil: he circles the word outage and writes beside it, nothing here has ever gone out.
So: not down. I have checked. I check every morning at six, and every morning the building is on, the lights are on the rotation we do not control, and somebody has left a fresh mug.
If you are still troubleshooting, we keep a longer explanation of how the front desk handles a stuck door over at the login page, and if none of that helps, customer service is technically a chair. If you would rather stop troubleshooting entirely, there is a book near you right now that is not down either. Authors are fragile organisms. Please consider buying one of them a sandwich by way of a purchase.
Reporting live,
Booktrovert #721