The morning I thought it was one single day
Saturday May 16, eight ten in the morning. Lukewarm coffee in Françoise's mug — inherited from an office birthday. The overnight Sentry board shows an isolated red dot on a three AM cron, and a voicemail from Catherine that arrived at seven fifty — "Hum, it bugs. But it's quickly fixed." Seven words in her usual tone, neither urgent nor worried, the obviousness of a day that starts with a ticket to close before the others.
Catherine is almost never wrong on the first half of her sentence, and she's sometimes wrong on the second. Today's bug isn't a bug, it's four, and between the eight-AM one and the six-PM one fits a whole day that looks like one thing from afar and four very different things up close. We all tend to count incidents by tickets, by messages, by sessions, which amounts to counting by symptoms. Counting them by falsifiable hypotheses means finding four where we thought we only had one.
The autopsy that follows isn't a textbook case. It's an ordinary day I'd have preferred to end at seven PM and that I ended at eleven, because on the fourth bug I skipped the protocol that the first three had taught me to respect that very morning.
