Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Bye Bye, Tavia!

Yesterday, I went to the going away lunch for a coworker. Tavia and I were hired at NERSC at the same time. We were part of a batch of 4 people hired at the time. Jason, Tom, myself, and Tavia were hired for slightly different reasons. Tom was an old hand at computing and has been involved with higher end computers since the late 1960s. Jason was hired to be part of the then existing Advanced Systems Group to do short term tech exploration. I was hired for my user experience in HPC and the fact that I had been involved in sysadmin in a very heterogenous environment with very demanding up times. Tavia, Tom, and myself were all tasked to the Computational Systems Group. We were to learn how to take care of the Big Beasts we have here. Tom was thrown onto PDSF. I was tasked to the Crays. Tavia went on to the IBM systems. We all did relatively well. I took over as lead on the Crays after six or so months. Tavia was given her own smaller SP3 that she was lead for. The four of us had something of a bond, but this was so for especially Tom, Tavia, and I.

We would go get breakfast and lunch together. When we went on rotation in the beginning, we often helped each other with the systems we were less familiar with. We went out to lunch for when we past our various year anniversaries. We would tell each other some very confidential information. We were pretty close. We even used to pull pranks on each other. During Tavia's going away lunch, we did something of a roast. We all shared our stories. I shared my prank.

Here at NERSC I am noted for a few things. One is that I am a very... individualistic person. :D I am also noted for when something goes wrong I stay with it until its fixed. If there's lots of downtime during a rotation, for whatever, reason, I'll come in and do the work no matter the time without complaint as many times as needed. One of the other things that I am noted for is that I have a magic touch with one of the computers: seaborg. If I go on rotation, it DIES. We get what we call a system wide outage for seaborg almost all the time I go on rotation. I don't even have to login. It's within 48 hours of my rotation starting, sometimes within minutes, and sometimes multiple times. My worst case is when it was 4 times in one week, most of the time at the wee hours of the morning. The operators coined a term for it: "Will hugged seaborg." The funny part was that I just adopted this and would jokingly threaten other sysadmins that if they were not nice to me, I'd go hug seaborg. The nasty part of that was that for a little while it looked as though if I threatened the machine - again without logging in and as a joke, purely! - the machine would impact in a flaming, crashing outage of some bizarro kind or another. This brings us to the joke.

When this was a serious problem, and even IBM used to grumble when and stock extra parts when I went on rotation at this juncture, Tavia went on rotation. It was an early rotation: we'd been there only about a year or so. She'd just started for her week. I called down to the operators and convinced one of them to page her with the words "Will Hugged Seaborg." They did. She flipped out and logged in looked for the nature of the meltdown and disaster...and found de nada. She called Ops and raised hell until they confessed why they'd paged her with that. They fessed up that it was my lil joke. Next thing I knew, she was outside the floater office that I had in OSF - and later became my full time one when they moved us all down to Oakland from Berkeley - and glaring. She opened the door and simply said with irritation blended with amusement: "Don't. Do. That. Again." and with as much dignity as possible with me cracking up marched off to her office.

Tavia is leaving for an HPC center in Britain. She's engaged to a Brit. She comes from another exogamous family (she's a dual citizen of France and the US and of jewish, persian, english, french, and other assorted backgrounds) She claims that she will be back in a couple years dragging her fiance - then to be husband - back with her to the States. Somehow I don't think that she will be. Most likely she'll be snapped up by another HPC facility. She's quite a prize for her brilliance and creativity. She's also someone that's trustworthy and a very hard worker. The sad part is, if all goes well, I won't be here. I'll stay in touch with her, but...I don't think we'll be coworkers again.

I am going to miss her.

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