Why is it that a tech support problem doesn’t become an emergency until it’s most inconvenient?

I was quite literally standing up and collecting my wallet to go to lunch when I got approached by one of our support people and a fellow developer with a problem at a partner site. They described the problem and asked if I can log on to see if I can figure out the answer. I asked if it could wait until after lunch, and they said no because the system is going to be packed up and shipped to the evaluation center and it has to be working by then, and so we’ve got a 1 hour window to get it working.

So I go over and get Bob to log me on, and at first I’m lost. The subsystem that sends back the heart beat from one system to the other was the responsibility of a programmer who doesn’t work here any more. The log files don’t help much. But one thing I notice is that according to the logs, they’ve had this problem as far back as the logs go, about 14 days. Ok, it’s been a problem for 14 days, but evidently you can’t be bothered to fix it until there is 1 hour to go before an irrevokable deadline. Why is this my problem again?

I do some poking around a config file that I’ve had very little to do with in the past and I notice something glaring – the system is configured as [system] “2”, but it has another similar parameter set to an id of “1”. Ok, leaving aside the little question of why there are two parameters that control the same thing when one could probably be derived from the other, is this it? I change the second parameter to a 2 and restart it. And almost immediately start seeing heartbeats coming.

I’m out of there before they can find something else for me to work on, and the cafeteria doesn’t close for another 45 minutes. Yeah, me.