Hello World!
Ah, the late-night cutover – a sacred ritual of the networking industry, where brave, fully-caffeinated souls gather in dimly-lit rooms to connect cables, push buttons, pray, and watch the chaos unfold. For the uninitiated, a cutover is the delicate act of migrating from an old network to a new one, often performed at ungodly hours when the business is asleep, but the network demons are wide awake.
The Planning Phase: Every cutover begins with a meticulously crafted plan, usually written by someone who won’t actually be present for the implementation. The elegant document is filled with comforting illusions – timelines, rollback strategies, test plans, and contingencies that all assume a world where nothing ever goes wrong. The phrase, “it will only take two hours” will be used liberally throughout the document. Spoiler alert: it never takes just two hours.
The Cutover Window: Where Hope Goes to Die: Midnight strikes, it’s go-time. The first few steps go smoothly. Confidence builds. Then, inevitably, something doesn’t work. Suddenly, critical services start to fail. The logs provide no useful information, Google has never heard of your specific issue, and the vendor’s 24/7 “support” line is an automated black hole.
At some point, the project manager – who was supposed to be just an observer – starts offering meaningless advice like, “Have you tried restarting the routers?” Yes Chad, we have.
Time to Panic: Around 2:30 AM, the situation escalates. Someone suggests rolling back, but no one wants to admit defeat. Instead, we double down on frantic debugging, swapping out configurations, and making last minute “fixes” that will absolutely come back to haunt us in production.
At this point, the chat logs consist mostly of variations of “WTF”, and you’ve sent so many Slack messages that even the AI bot pings to ask if you are seriously in of need help.
Miracles Happen: By 4:00 AM, the team reaches an existential crisis. Some start contemplating career changes. Then, out of nowhere, something works – no one knows exactly why, but we all agree to never touch it again. Someone cautiously announces, “I think we’re good?” No one actually believes it, but the system isn’t on fire, so we take the win.
Post-Mortem and Gaslighting: By 8:00 AM, the rest of the business wakes up, blissfully unaware of the trauma we all just endured. Emails announce that, “The cutover was successful with minimal issues.” Lies. We all know better, but it’s easier this way!
And that, my friends, is why every Systems Engineer develops a love-hate relationship with late-night cutovers. Mostly hate.
Stay tuned for more nerdy columns about my experiences as an SE.
