Bleep

Melvin’s favourite philosophy regularly and proudly referred to our work as surgery on society.
The M8 signpost for St John’s floats across my windscreen offering me the suggestion, not to visit the hospital but to direct my glassy-eyed, motorway ponderings towards the recollection of my ex-superior.
I expect his succinct sentiment would have resulted in a profound splash of conjecture had it ever been dropped into casual conversation with innocents, ignorant of Melvin’s ways. Despite its bold connotations, however, I have never wielded a political scalpel or dissected economies from macro to micro in pursuit of the consummate social machine. Nor do I harbour the ferocity of an insane conviction which may compel me to gouge and scatter lives in its name.
In fact, this salvo of words in which I have so often been caught has more literal origins than its metaphorical vagueness first suggests, a fact that I liked to use against him.
“But we don’t wear masks.” I argued, the last time I ever heard him expound.
“Oh, we all wear masks.” he patronised, really going for the metaphor this time. I hated it when he went all esoteric.
The car plunges into darkness and I glance, first at the illuminated Livingston junction in the mirror, then at the illuminated clock on the dash. It grins back ten to two and I frown back into my reminiscence.
That last conversation took place in the office. We were enduring another empty afternoon, waiting for a callout and knowing that we should have been brushing up on the finer points of our job but preferring instead to engage each other in vocal dog fighting. Our desks are positioned in the shape of an ‘L’ and, despite our discourse, we both staunchly retained our right to stare straight ahead over our laptops into the angle of the letter, like an Abba-video.
I creased my face and Melvin allowed a puff of indignation to propel him into an unwanted elaboration.
“Think about it!” he commanded, holding a desperate emphasis in his hands. “A surgeon didn’t design the human body and he doesn’t know every detail of its operation because medicine just isn’t that advanced yet, but he’s still expected to repair it when it breaks. We’re exactly the same! We have to work on patient’s that we didn’t design..”
Patients!
“..... and our working environments are specifically designed to accommodate those patients. Just like an operating theatre!”
“Oh come on, Melvin! There’s no way you could be a surgeon. I real surgeon, I mean”
“Probably not but I’m sure a,” he whined the next word, “real surgeon wouldn’t be able to do what we do. That doesn’t alter the similarities.”
“Do you know what pretentious means?”
“Do you know what disrespectful means?” He countered, then continued without waiting for my answer. “We use specialised tools and people rely on us to get the job done under pressure, just like our Hippocratic counterparts.” He dropped his hand to his waist then onto the desktop. “AND we’re all slaves to these little buggers.”
I capitulated to his action and glanced at the pager lying on his desk, tiny, black, its size and silence in complete contradiction to the implications for its wearer. This was the first thing to come from Melvin’s seldom closed mouth that I could relate to and I couldn’t deny the congruity.
Automatically, I pulled my own from my belt and checked the LCD display just to make sure it hadn’t gone off, something I often did during the long drives home when I had the radio on loud. You’d be surprised what Melvin’s voice could drown out.
The pager, tying me to my work 24 hours a day like the world’s longest baby harness, the reins held in the unforgiving hands of our customers who will tug at the slightest whiff of a problem. It’s like a vicious insect, permanently clinging to my thoughts and my waist, waiting to pounce and bury it’s sonic fangs into my head to suck the slumber from me.
It has taken many nocturnal attacks from the plastic beast and as many trepid ventures into undisturbed sleep to become accustomed to it’s mostly silent presence and, even now, I still play the fate games.
Don’t start the engine before you fasten the seatbelt or the pager will go off.
Tap the desk three times before you stand up or the pager will go off.
Take you trousers off before your socks or the pager will go off.
I envy everyone who doesn’t wear a pager.
I see the runway lights of Edinburgh Airport as the motorway prepares for its descent into the city. Amongst the flickering there is a piercing whiteness which mingles with the dimmer landing beacons before springing into the air like a frog with a torch.
I continue to bounce my gaze between the cat’s eyes and the white lights in the sky which turn to two cones of soiled illumination when the aircraft slips into the underbelly of pea-soup cloud. White turns into a collage palette of greys as the plane’s machete lamps hack a path upwards to clear sky.
Then suddenly, the light vanishes and the plane is gone. The roar from my engine drowns out the drone of aviation which would betray the aircraft’s existence but I know it’s still up there, somewhere above me. Memory is my only corroborator.
I consider my customers. They know I’m out here even though they can’t see or hear me. Home is my cloud but my pager is their radar.
“I wish we didn’t have to wear these arsehole bleepy bastard things.” I said that day.
Melvin’s response still haunts. He looked straight at me, grave and flat when he gave it.
“We have to,” he whispered. “because when that pager goes off and we go out on a job, believe me, it can be a matter of life and death.”

And so into the operating theatre.
My contact in the bank who was dragged out of bed long before me, leads me into the comms room. He’s obviously been saving some anger for yours truly and he answers my petition for a description of the problem with, “Your shite network isn’t working.”
This is a common reaction. At three o’clock in the morning, people need someone to blame.
The air-conditioning units breathe a perfect temperature and humidity on us, not for our sake, I find it a little chilly in these places. This is an environment specifically engineered for Melvin’s patients, the various pieces of network and computer equipment which hum at each other as if engaged in some sort of silicon chant ritual.
I stop and look at my host who already seems to be wrestling with his regret. He asks about Melvin and I offer gentle reluctance after which he is happier to discuss the issue at hand.
He explains that a file transfer job which sends account update details from a server in the Edinburgh computer centre to servers in each UK branch office is failing.
My mind switches into diagnostic mode and begins to draw a picture of the problem, for which I need the answers to some questions.
“How did the problem manifest itself?”
Error code on the Edinburgh server noticed by the operators on the bridge. That’s when he was called. The error code suggested a problem with the network.
He shows me the hand-written copy of the message.

E4604 - PROC_syspat “Transport Layer timeout received”
XCOM - Start XFER failed

Very helpful. Another painfully vague network error description written by a software developer who didn’t understand networks.
“How many branches are affected?”
All of them.
“What protocol is the application using?”
He looks at me blankly so I take a guess.
“IP?”
He nods.
OK. I’m thinking this through now. Server in Edinburgh is trying to send data across the network to the branches but it can’t so the route from here to the branches must be broken somewhere. A basic communication problem. All I have to do is find the break.
I ask him to show me the server (prep the patient). It’s an NT machine so, when he enters the password to unlock the desktop, I open a DOS window (scalpel, nurse) and enter ping 192.168.21.30. This, he has told me is the address of one of the branch servers.
Request Timed Out.
OK that confirms the communication problem. Next, I ping an address on the same network as the server and receive the message:
Reply from 10.3.1.26: bytes=32 time=<10ms TTL=254
OK, so the server is on the network and can talk to local machines. I decide to check the router that connects the local server network to all the other networks. I telnet to it and check that all its network interfaces are operational and that the IP Routing Table is correct. I try a ping from the router to the branch and this works. From what I see, the shite network doesn’t seem so shite, (blood pressure 120/80). Time to regroup my thoughts.
Server file transfer failed and server can’t ping any branch which fits.
Server CAN ping something on the same network.
Router looks OK and can ping the branches.
I have an idea and quickly use the traceroute command to the same branch address as before. This is similar to ping but will tell me each router through which the test packet passes. The command fails at the first router which confirms my suspicions.
Something that Melvin taught me early on about networks was the importance of the big picture. By its very nature, a computer network is a forum for tinkering and a surprisingly efficient medium for the propagation of fuckups. A problem can be caused by any number of actions, many of which may not appear to have anything to do with the symptoms you see.
“Always be aware of the consequences of your actions and of those of others,” was the way he used to put it. Typically dramatic.
I ask my contact if any work was done on the server recently. He shrugs and says he isn’t sure but can check.
In a company this size, many departments mean much incorrectly perceived demarcation.
While he’s away I check something on the server and allow myself a tired smile.
He returns to tell me an Operating System upgrade was done the previous evening but that wouldn’t cause what we’re seeing. I have my contradiction ready.
“I think it did.” I point out the parameter on the screen. “ This Default Router setting is blank. It shouldn’t be. When the server needs to communicate with another device on a network, it uses this setting to send data out of the local net.” He stares blankly me so I use analogy, the weaponry of instruction. “Suppose you’re in a room with ten doors, each a different colour. You want to get to the hallway because your going out of the house to meet big Janice from the helpdesk but you don’t know which door to take. You might end up in the bog or the kitchen or your gay flatmate’s bedroom so you just stay where you are.
“I don’t have a gay flatmate.”
“I know, this is an analogy. Anyway, that’s what’s wrong with your server. It’s got data to send but it doesn’t know how to get it off the local network so it just gives up. Suppose you had a bit of paper in your room with you that said ‘Yellow door to the hall’? You be fine then ‘cos you’d know where to go. Well, that’s what the Default Router parameter does. It tells the server the address of the router to use for data that’s bound for a different network.”
“But it worked yesterday.” he argues.
“Some operating system upgrades delete certain parameters. Looks like that happened here. My guess is that whoever did the upgrade didn’t know what the Default Router parameter did and just left it blank. He probably tested by pinging another device on the same network and assumed that was good enough. He just didn’t understand the yellow-door principle.”
Analogy, the teacher’s club.
My contact starts the file transfer job and the lack of error message confirms the fix. He nods slowly and guiltily. “Sorry I dragged you out.”
I shrug.
“Sometimes we all do things without fully understanding the consequences. Don’t worry about it. Your intentions were good.”

So there you have it, this is what I do. The maintenance of the some of the country’s data networks is my vocation. Hardly a matter of life and death.
People in my field like to use this quote; ‘The network is the computer’. It’s more than that though, it’s society’s nervous system. So much of what we do, so much of what we demand is reliant on the instant transfer of data around the country or the world.
Of course, you’re thinking the Internet. OK, but how many of us really rely on that media darling?
I’m talking about the real world here; cash machines, phone banking, shop credit card readers, all the less glamorous electronic utilities. I’m talking about your electricity company, your hospital, your phone company, your local MacDonald’s. They all have networks. They all need to communicate.
Computers are taking over the world, but only as long as people like me keep reacting to the bleep.
Melvin was right. We are society’s neurologists.
I should be home in an hour if I take the quickest route out of Edinburgh, through Stockbridge onto Ferry Road, then across Maybury towards the motorway but instead I go up the hill, across George St, Princess St onto the Western Approach Road. I join the A71 and follow it to its junction with the Bypass, all the way pretending that I am merely taking a different route to the M8.
When I reach the concrete artery I fail to join the rising flow of metallic corpuscles and continue along the A71 towards Livingston. The city suddenly fades to a green, dark in the early morning light.
Again I think of Melvin and of the results of my actions. That day of petty argument was the last I ever saw of him.
If the parallel with surgery had irritated me then his attempt at placing the burden of life and death on us was downright infuriating, even moreso when he explained it.
“Imagine you were called out to fix a fault at one of our financial customers and you made a real mess of it, I mean not only did you fail to resolve the problem, but in the process, you managed to bring the whole network down.”
“Wouldn’t happen. All the big banks have too much redundancy built in.”
“You’re assuming perfect network design. Isn’t always the case but even with that, any network can be brought down, especially with our knowledge. Start playing around with IP route redistribution or spanning tree parameters and you could really cause carnage. All it takes is a wrong move and then you lose your cool and forget what you did and the company’s in trouble. I’m talking potential corporate destruction!”
Told you Melvin was dramatic.
“If that company happens to be a bank or an insurance company, then you’re directly affecting peoples lives. Take away society’s security and people start to die.”
I understood the risks but also had faith in the network designs. Christ, if you’re a bank, you get audited by the bank of England to make sure you have enough IT contingency. If they’re happy, that should have been good enough for Melvin.
I was insulted by the suggestion that I might bring down a company but I withheld any argument. It just seemed pointless. I took my gripe home oblivious to the impending impact of consequence.
That night while I stewed, a conference meal in Dalmahoy Country Club was disrupted when one of the delegates, exhausted by his journey from North Carolina and unusually irritable because the airline had lost his luggage due to a fault with the computer system that read the luggage tags, was told he’d had too much to drink by a waitress who’d been punched by her drunk husband just before she left home to start her shift. He responded by smashing one of the empty wine bottles and holding it to a fellow delegate’s throat with the frantic threat that, if he wasn’t given another bottle of La Fiole du Pape, the Jap was toast.
I’ve reached the Linburn junction and stop beside the flowers bunched on the pavement. Melvin was called out that same night to a customer in Edinburgh but, when he reached this junction, he pulled out into the path of a police car on its way from Livingston to a 999 call at Dalmahoy.
By all accounts, both vehicles were a mess. Melvin died before they could cut him free. One of the policemen is still in hospital, the other fit enough to prepare for the inevitable recriminations.
I think about consequences and might grin at the irony were it not so tragic. What a way to die, a victim of you own philosophy. Thing is, there was no problem for Melvin to fix that night.
His insult stayed with me and I took my revenge by logging a false call. I wanted teach him a lesson but this time, deceit was the teacher’s club and it killed him.
Were it not for me, he wouldn’t have been out that night and would be alive today. His death was a direct consequence of my action and it has proven him right.
So I make a decision. Tomorrow I will visit the police and complete the surgery I started.
I get out of the car and lay my pager before the flowers.
Let it bleep if it will.

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