Marc Sirkin's Mindnumbing Thoughts

I've heard stories about insane interview questions and tactics from the likes of Google (impossible programming tasks) and Microsoft . I flew to New Orleans this week and on the way up, I noticed how many baseball fields there are in the NY area from above. For example, I counted 28 baseball diamonds in Central park alone! The next time I interview someone, I'm going to ask them "How many baseball diamonds are there in the United States?" I've heard variations of this like "How many gas stations are there in the U.S." as well, but I like mine better. I did a google search for this but didn't come up with anything.

So our servers are finally up... and I hope I didn't (but I think I did) steal one of my daughters wishes to get it back. As I was leaving for work this morning, she showed me a "gold coin" she got from school and said that it was from a pot of gold. She told me you could wish on the coin and handed it to me. My mind immediately thought.. "Well, I'd wish for the servers to be back up." But what I said out loud to her was "Honey, I won't use one of your wishes." But it was too late. I did it. In a microsecond... I selfishly stole one of my daughters wishes to get a stupid server back online. By the time I got to work... the servers were back and my web sites up and running. So you know it was the coin that did it (well, that and 4 full days of consultants and geeks running around). I'm a horrible person!

The Web sites that I'm responsible for marketing have been down for 4 days. We're almost back up as I type this - and as a marketing guy who is dangerous enough to fake his way through a conversation with techies, I'm about baked. Sunday at 3 am we crashed. Not an unusal occurance for our site but still a problem none-the-less. Monday comes and I find out we lost a (some?) hard drives in an array on a cluster. Blah blah blah. Monday night is here and I've managed to survive by sending emails to my entire company, thereby sealing my fate as the tech, web guy. Did I mention I'm a marketing guy yet? Never coded an original program, never loaded a database, never even saw an Oracle table. She was good in the Matrix though. Tuesday, still down. No relief in sight. An array controller is broken. Get a new one! Not good enough. Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, Wednesday night - still down. Can't sleep, can't breath. What's so hard? I hate technology. I'm i...