Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Itinerary Updates

He got his passport in 4 hours.

But he didn't make the flight. International flight check-in gates close 1 hour before flight time.

Which meant he had to forfeit his ticket and buy another one.

Saturday, November 24, 2007

How to renew your passport in 4 hrs ?

One word... Beg

Know no shame. Tell the poor clerk on the other side of the passport office that you are an idiot. Your girlfriend is already at the airport. Your flight is in 4 hours. Your passport has expired. And if your girlfriend leaves for Japan alone, then she will leave. Forever. Period.

To those who think they will have a probability to be (for whatever reason) in a similar situation. You must bring the following to the passport office:
  • Birth Certificate
  • Old expired passport
  • Recent\New Passport Photos
  • Medicare card (for additional identification)
  • Travel itinerary
  • Money
  • Any proof to support your 'emergency travel need' story
And if you have managed to survive the night. (and not already found stabbed to death in bed with an ice pick). Then.. Good Luck.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

fooking idiot

The fooking idiot's passport has fooking expired !!!!!!!!!!!! fooking 1 year ago ~~~~~ !!!!!!!!!!!

And he tells me this the night before our flight ~~~~ fook .... !!

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

While I'm away...

I will try to blog my daily outings from Japan ...

and take lots and lots of pics everyday !!

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Working the System

The place I'm working at outsources it's infrastructure to different IT companies.

Company A for Networks
Company B for Data Center facilities
Company C for Server \ Domain hosts.... And so on....

A very lengthy process needs to be followed to be able to get any one of these outsourcing companies to provision any task for another third party company. On most cases I go about this lengthy process. Get service requests raised. Get approvals for the change. Get resources committed to the task.

In a perfect environment, when these companies work well together everything will be ok. And everyone is happy.

But it never is.

My service request was lodged, approved and assigned 2 weeks ago. Two weeks later and it still is sitting in someone's queue waiting to be actioned.

When there are no dependencies in play, we usually just wait for them to respond.

But this change had to be actioned before my implementation this weekend... so what to do ?

I called Company C and raised a high severity case with them telling that the Production environment for a certain application wasn't working. And that we had narrowed it down to one legacy setting on the network.

In 5 minutes, I had raised enough alarm bells that got my change request completed almost immediately.

Only problem now is that I have to answer to questions on why they had never heard of this supposedly 'Production Application' prior to my phone call. crap..