What Happens When You Fail

I kept repeating to myself, "I don't know what I'm so upset about." The server migration project had gone poorly, I lost my weekend and now the project would pass to another tech to [hopefully] bring it home without any more embarrassing issues. Clearly, I had fouled up and now what remains is the licking of wounds and rueful reflection on what should have gone better, will go better in the future.

I guess I'm feeling like a bit of a loser tonight and having no better place to throw it, I offer it up here as a bit of introspection. Doing IT for money isn't a simple process and there are clearly more knowledgeable, more experienced techs out there. I happen to work with some of them and it's a constant process of amazement to watch them go through the paces and cheerfully correct some glaring issue that I should have caught. The mind-devils go mad inside my head, poking me with sporks and saying "See? See! We knew there was someone better at this than you!"

Awright - enough of that.

The point of IT, of life in general, is to live with your mistakes and learn from them. What I would learn from this server migration project is the following:

1) Always, always update the drivers.
2) File Server Migrations have joined the twenty-first century. We don't use Robocopy anymore - we use the File Server Migration Toolkit.
3) Never package two major changes to an environment in one day - deploying antivirus and cutting over to a new file server in one evening was just asking for trouble.

I'm going to get some rest and get some perspective. It's a process and sometimes it's about realizing that you aren't as far along as you thought you were. Just realizing that there's a place you need to get to is the first step in getting there.