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Surviving Hurricane Katrina: A sysadmin's epic DR (as in Didn't Realise) odyssey

25 days of refugee sex and guns in odd places

Friday, 2 September

Finish paperwork. Take care of some small details. CEO tells me to take the rest of the day off.

Take the office manager to her buddy's house.

Was introduced to my wife.

Ate and drank entirely too much.

Saturday, 3 September

Three hours tidying up the last details with the new data centre.

Tech support for the newly delivered laptops ('No, of course your network shares don't work. No, I don't have access to your old outlook data yet').

Realised that while I had a bunch of backup tapes, the tape drive was still in New Orleans.

First date with my future wife.

Monday, 5 September

More tech support for laptop users.

I begin to realise that I missed a lot of data.

Henry is heard from! He saw the hurricane was coming right at us and figured that he should take his boat out one last time since it was probably going to be destroyed. His boat did survive the storm with less damage than his deductible.

Amusingly, after the storm he was out in the boat looking at damage when he was boarded by the Coast Guard. They confiscated the guns he had on board. No idea if he ever got them back.

Tuesday, 6 September

Lots more tech support for laptop users. We keep finding more employees, only a couple of them evacuated with business laptops. Desktop support sucks.

Got my new tape drive and discover that I cannot recover my tapes because there are no decryption keys.

Remainder of the week is spent getting yelled at for all sorts of things I had no control over and a few I did (like the decrypt keys), dealing with remote user issues, rebuilding the corporate network. Job offers are pouring in from people that I used to work with. Everyone wants to help.

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