No Room at the Inn

z/VM has some of the best customers in the known universe. As I look back, I see how fortunate I've been at times to work with various people and the acts of kindness that they have shown me. One particular story sticks out in my mind.

I believe it was April of 1995. We had a customer in the Boston area that was having performance problems with Focus databases on the relatively new VM/ESA Version 1 Release 2.2. We had come up with a modification to correct this. The plan was simple:

1. Drive the six hours to Boston
2. Apply the fix
3. Run a test
4. Go to lunch to celebrate the solution
5. Drive back to Endicott

Around 5:30pm, I realized the plan would need some adjustment. While the drive to Boston was uneventful, the fix did not improve things. I'd be staying the night in Boston. But wait, did I mention this was the day of the Boston Marathon? The half million people or so that showed up to see Cosmas Ndeti of Kenya win the marathon with a time of 2:09:22 had taken all the rooms in the city that were within the IBM corporate hotel limit.

The customer system programmer to the rescue. He was a virtual bachelor that day as his wife was out of town visiting relatives. He invited me home to stay in the guest room. He gave me a ride so I would not have to endure Boston driving. I remember on the drive home, I saw a station wagon (who remembers those?) had a kiddie pool tied on top. Except it wasn't tied very securely as at one point I see it move from shaking in the wind to flying free right at us. My host didn't flinch, as if this was a regular occurrence in Boston traffic. A flick of the steering wheel and he negotiated around the small plastic pool, weaving out of the lane and back again. He didn't even break stride in whatever story he was telling at the time.

At his house, he treated me to leftovers; introduced me to his small dog who seemed to like having another friend in the house; and made me feel at home. We logged into the systems that night to watch performance on some batch processing. I don't recall what baud modem he had, but it was fast enough to paint the screen of a 3270 emulator, and to allow us to see how things were running. We didn't pull an all-nighter as we knew there would be more to do with the problem, and status for managers in the morning.

The next day, we went back to work gathering more data to help with a better fix. I would return home and consult with others. The ultimate solution was to introduce the RECORDMDC option for minidisk cache. It worked like a charm. I learned a lot through that crit sit (critical situation) about teamwork, our customers, and making the best of the moment. If you're out there Dincer, thanks for being a great host. It set the bar for how z/VM should treat its guests: don't starve them, keep them informed, protect them, and don't push them to exhaustion.