It's Christmas holiday time back in the day, and like everyone else in his department, this IT pilot fish carries a text pager for on-call after-hours support.
"One weekend, I started hearing a strange intermittent buzzing sound, apparently from the furnace downstairs," fish says. "I could hear it through the forced-air heating vent in the foyer. I ran downstairs to investigate, but the buzzing sound stopped.
"About 15 minutes later, I heard the buzzing sound again. But by the time I got down to the basement, it stopped again.
"This was baffling and driving us crazy. It would start buzzing, my wife and I would both jump up off the couch, she would listen by the vent and I would race downstairs again. This went on for several hours.
"Then I noticed I had left my bag next to the vent.
"I suddenly remembered I had the pager! I wasn't expecting any issues over the holiday weekend, but when I checked the pager, there were a dozen text messages on it, all indicating the archive log partition had run out of disk space.
"I duly paged the DBA, who resolved the problem."
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