Humor, Hard Work and Other Keys to Success in Tech: Jaqui Lynch on IT Social Hour
Jaqui Lynch, a current IBM Power consultant and former mainframer, recounts how her sense of humor and work ethic helped her persevere in a male-dominated field
Andy Wig:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of IT Social Hour. I’m Andy Wig, senior editor at TechChannel, and today I’d like to welcome on Jaqui Lynch. She’s an independent computer consultant specializing in AIX, Linux and VIO servers. She’s also a regular contributor to TechChannel. And she’s just got a very interesting story to tell about how she got to this point. Going all the way back to a teenager in New Zealand. She’s got a history working on both mainframes and Power servers, and she’s got plenty of observations to share. So let’s get into it. Hi, Jaqui. Thanks for coming on IT Social Hour.
Jaqui Lynch:
Hey, Andrew. Thanks very much for having me.
Wig:
Glad to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for some time. And I think probably a good way to start off is just to … This might be the toughest question you face all day, but what do you do as a computer consultant?
Lynch:
That is the hard question. Yeah. So I primarily work on operating systems. So things like installation, tuning, debugging, those kind of things. And I also do some architecture work where I actually help customers plan and design. And then I have a couple of clients where really my job is to do a lot of research for them. They come up with maybe a Linux question and I go off and research it and then come back with what I think that they should do. So it’s really a very much a mixed bag. I have some clients that I’m kind of on call for, like when they have a problem, I’m really their admin. And then I have others that just want to be able to ask questions. So it really is variable, which makes it interesting.
Wig:
Yeah. And so how you got to this point, I mean, going back to the beginning, I know a little bit about how that got started. And I think the way you got started probably differs from the usual path people take. Tell me about how you got into computer science to begin with.
Lynch:
Well, the short answer is by accident. I was 17 and I just finished high school. None of my family had ever gone to college. So it was really important to my dad that I went to college. And I was trying to decide which one, and I was going to study French, German, Spanish and philosophy, and my idea was to be a translator. Prior to that, I’d actually wanted to be in the police like my dad, but when I was 13, I got glasses and the rules were you had to be able to see a certain distance without glasses in order to join. So the translator thing was what I got excited about. And then my cousin got a job with the New Zealand government as a computer operator with the chance to become a programmer. I didn’t know what one of those did. So I sent them a letter.
And I think it was on either green ink on purple paper or the other way around, just saying, “Well, what does a computer programmer do? ” They sent me back a ticket to fly down to Wellington for a job interview to find out what they did. So I’d never been on a plane before. I’d never been to Wellington, so it seemed like a good idea. And they offered me a job with part-time university leave, but I had to change my major to a combination of computer science and German. So that’s how I got started. And when I got home, I told my dad that I was leaving in about four weeks. He was pretty upset because I was the one that was going to get a degree. And I was very fortunate that my oldest sister walked in and informed everybody she was getting married in two weeks.
And so they all started panicking and left me alone. And so I did two years as a programmer and then I found writing the same programs over again and debugging other people’s programs, not as exciting as it could have been. And I moved over into the operating system group. And this was all mainframe.
And then from there, I worked for various companies, consulting companies and so on in New Zealand. I did a stint with national advanced systems who became Hitachi data systems. And I did a lot of training for them, running around training hardware engineers and operating systems. And then we moved to the States in 1990 where my husband got accepted into MIT to do a PhD. And I started working for Boston College about six months later in the administrative systems, which eventually also included the academic Unix systems, which is how I got into Unix around 1993. Then when I left there in 1999, I basically was working solely on Unix by then. So it was quite a transition.
Wig:
Yeah. Quite an arc there from just writing a letter, knowing nothing about computer science at all. That must have been a heck of a letter you wrote to get on this path.
Lynch:
I’d love to ask them, because it’s still going to be on my government file. I’d love to ask them for a copy of it one day just to see, because I don’t know what they saw in that letter, because it was a typical 17 year old. So what is this thing called a programmer? But they saw something.
Wig:
Yeah. I wonder if they, maybe they just don’t get many letters like that, or especially back then. I wonder.
Lynch:
I think back then too, they were really desperate for people. And there was a 12-week programming class you could go to at the local polytech. So they did send me and my cousin actually to that class. So it wasn’t like they couldn’t train you. And I guess they didn’t have to train any bad habits out of us because neither of us had ever worked on a computer.
Wig:
So maybe that’s exactly what they’re looking for, huh?
Lynch:
It could be.
Wig:
Would this approach work these days? Could a 17 year old-
Lynch:
Probably not, because it would be pretty hard to find somebody that doesn’t have some kind of computer knowledge, even if it’s just sending email
Wig:
Right. But yeah, to go in and saying that you’re a blank slate, there’s no such thing, I guess, anymore. Everyone’s got some computer science knowledge, I guess.
Lynch:
And I mean, it was really exciting back then. My first mainframes were a 145, 370, and we had the only 370, 168 MP. So it was two of them hooked together in the whole South Pacific. So it was pretty exciting and pretty unusual stuff that happened. And we used to have to patch it at the console by typing things in on hexadecimal. I mean, we talk in old school. Nowadays, it doesn’t work that way, but it was kind of fun and an incredible learning experience.
Wig:
What are the new people that are just new to the field, do their eyes just glaze over when you start talking about the old interfaces that you used to work with and all that?
Lynch:
I think in a lot of cases, they can’t fathom what that was like. I mean, I can remember we were working on 3277 green screens, and we were one of the first in the country to get the new 3279 color screens. We didn’t have TSO or anything like that. We finally got that a year into the job, and it was very, very exciting to get these things, which nowadays we just take all of this as if it’s normal, which now it is, but it wasn’t back then.
Wig:
I mean, now gone from green screens to now AI coding assistants and all that jazz. Other changes, I mean, coming up, you must have been … I’m assuming there are more women in the field now than there were when you were … What was it like?
Lynch:
When I started, there were two women in operating systems in New Zealand. One of them worked for the Ministry of Works, and then it was me working for the government computing center, and there was one in Australia. So it was an interesting experience because there had been some issues previously, and so the people that I was working for hadn’t really wanted a woman to move in there, but it was a different time. You didn’t go to HR every five minutes reporting people because they said something insensitive. You learn to deal with it, you learned to have a sense of humor. In some cases, you learn to mess with their minds. So I don’t think I ever had to file an HR complaint, but it was definitely some misogyny going on.
I can remember going to a conference in Australia, and it was actually on GS2, and I turned up I was the only woman there, and they all thought I was there to take their notes, but in fact, I was actually doing some of the instructing. So I thought that was quite amusing. It really helped to have a sense of humor.
Nowadays, it’s quite different. So it’s hard to tell. For me now, I’ve been around long enough. Most people know who I am, so I don’t have to fight that battle. When I first got here, I did have to fight it a few times. People that were just like, “Well, you’re a woman, what would you know about technology?” And here I am writing articles on how to deal with power issues, and I mean power as an electricity. Yeah, I’m a big believer that women can do anything, but you do have to be able to work with other people. So it’s not good to get up in their face. It’s much better to try to negotiate a settlement.
Wig:
Okay. And in addition to those things and having the sense of humor, did you have to work? Did you feel like you had to work any differently or harder to prove yourself or how did that all work out?
Lynch:
Yeah. I mean, to a certain extent, I hate to say it, but to a certain extent, even today, women have to work harder to be accepted as being at the same level. But I’m a big believer that I want the same pay for the same job. And if that means I have to lift a 40-pound box of paper because that’s part of the job description, then that’s what I did. But coming up, I definitely work really long hours. It’s hard to tell if I was working more than the men I was working with because we were all working long hours then. And I think my worst week was 120 hours, but 80 hour weeks were pretty much the norm because there was just so much to do and it was interesting. If you’re a person that likes to solve problems and likes to bugging and things like that, becomes addictive and you really have to watch out.
Wig:
So you can kind of, maybe I imagine you get into it, time kind of flies by and you’re kind of, I don’t know, hopefully whatever kind of aspects of the job that are kind of drudgery maybe kind of also fly by as you get into that flow of things. I don’t know. I mean, I’m just trying to imagine … Yeah, I mean, working 120 hours a week or 80 hours a week. I mean, how do you do that? Is it just locking in and doing it or what?
Lynch:
I was going to say I didn’t have a life, but actually I did. So one of the places I worked was right next door to a nightclub. So we would get to work at seven, work all day. Then at night, we’d set some things running. We’d go next door to the nightclub for a couple of hours. The operators would page us when our jobs finished, we’d come back. And so you just learn to live with it. Now the thought now of working an 80 hour week, no. I’ve learned about this thing called sleep and it’s a really good thing. So when you’re young and you’re starting out, I was kind of working those sort of hours till I was probably 30 or so and we moved to the States and then one of the jobs I had, probably 60 hours weeks were more like normal, but once I went consulting, it’s like, no, I’m not doing that anymore.
It’s too tiring and there’s all these other things in life. I think that you start to appreciate more as you get older. Whereas when you’re younger, you’re trying to learn everything you can and you’re trying to move forward. And the way to do that is unfortunately to work hard.
Wig:
So I mean, looking back on those days, do you have any regrets about putting in all that time? Do you feel like you missed out on anything? I imagine it made you be the computer person that you are today, right? So maybe it’s hard to …
Lynch:
I don’t have any regrets about anything work-wise or otherwise. I think regrets are really unhealthy. There are things that I might have said or done in the past that I might apologize for to somebody, but in terms of work decisions that I made and so on, they were the best decisions I could make at the time. And I don’t regret the time because I still found time for my family. I would literally take off two weeks and go on vacation and I would be on call the whole time. But the first thing you learned, because it was pagers back then, was where to go so pagers didn’t work. They don’t work when you’re in the mountains. They don’t work when you’re in a lot of steel buildings. Because remember a lot of this was all before cell phones.
Wig:
Right. Yeah. Not quite as connected as we are today. So yeah, find your giant whatever amounts to like a fair day box or whatever or block the signal and they can’t find you. Yeah, you’re good.
Lynch:
I remember having a two-year contract with a customer and we were on call 7-24 and the techies would all go out for dinner and we literally would have bets on if any of us could make it through dinner, but without getting paged. And I don’t think we ever managed to have a dinner without getting paged.
Wig:
What kind of emergencies are they paging you about in these situations?
Lynch:
An issue with the operating system typically, or some critical job. It was a bank, so some critical job would crash or something like that. But literally one of the restaurants we went to, we would walk in and they would just tell us where they’d moved the phone to that week because none of us carried cell phones because they didn’t exist. So it was kind of a running joke.
Wig:
Using it.
Lynch:
Yeah.
Wig:
So you put in all that time, you put in the hours and you moved to Power Servers. When did you move to working on Power Servers?
Lynch:
So around 1993, so I was working at a college and I had the administrative systems, which was the mainframe stuff, all the things that run the college. And they wanted to bring in a scheduling package and it only ran on an RS6000 and the academic side were supporting Unix, but it was like VMS fax type stuff, digital Unix. Whereas in my case, I was basically, because it was mainframe, it was all IBM. And so I basically said to them, “Well, if you need someone to support it, then we’ll support it on the administrative side as long as it’s an administrative app.” Which it was doing scheduling for the football games and for classrooms and things. So clearly it was administrative. And so we all got some training in IBM’s AIX and it kind of went from there and it grew from like one machine to at one point we had a, I want to say a 22-node SP complex and we ran our voicemail system on it.
So we learned a lot about telephone switches because we had our own phone switch. It was an incredible learning experience, but that really started around ’93. And then when I left there in ’99, I still had the mainframe and I still did work on it, but a lot of my work was really on the Unix side.
Wig:
Okay. And AIX, that just reminds me, AIX, they just had their … Well, they’re basically celebrating their 40th anniversary right now. I think the actual birthday was at some point in the last month or something. I don’t know, what’s it been like to watch this operating system evolve and do what it does?
Lynch:
So I started on AIX 3.2.3, I think it was, and obviously we’re now at AIX 7.3.4. So I’ve been through all those flavors. I lived through when they bought in the virtualization and the VIO servers and everything. So pretty much from 3.2.3 on, I’ve seen it all. I really like where it’s going. IBM is adding a lot of features that are really, really useful and Power VM to me is the biggest innovator that they’ve added. That’s what gives us the VIO servers that let us virtualize everything. But there’s a lot of work that goes into planning that kind of environment and a lot of documentation that you really have to do and the people that don’t do it pay a big price because when things go wrong, you have to know how it’s all interconnected.
Wig:
I suppose that’s when they call you up, huh? Yeah, when things go wrong.
Lynch:
Yeah, sometimes.
Wig:
I mean, you alluded to it earlier about kind of all hours of the day having to maybe work on things, whether you’re on call or … I mean, is it still like that, where you might be working at, I don’t know, 3:00 in the morning your time?
Lynch:
I’m going to say yes and no because I have a couple of clients that I really am their admin. And so even when I go on vacation to New Zealand, they know they can reach out to me because they’re private clients. And I always send them when I go away the link to what the time is in New Zealand and let them know, “This is where I’ll be. If you have an emergency, you can call me, but please check the time because if all you want to do is say, “Hey, can we get together when I get back?” I really don’t need that at two o’clock in the morning.
Wig:
No.
Lynch:
So I work weird hours because I work on people’s production machines. And if the best time to work on, let’s say a banks machine is at 2 o’clock in the morning on a Sunday, then that’s when I get it. For the most part, it’s typically like some weekend work. Like this last weekend, I work Saturday and Sunday upgrading VIO servers. If they’re properly designed and architected, you could work on them while everybody’s running their production. If they’re not properly designed and architected, good luck. So the same with AIX, people have their own maintenance windows and that’s what I usually have to work with, but if it’s test or development or non-production, I can typically work on it during a regular day. So it really does vary, but I always laugh because people tell you that, well, the best way to be healthy, et cetera, et cetera, is to have a regular schedule. And I’m like, I haven’t had one of those since I was 17, so I wouldn’t know what one was like.
Wig:
And you’re like, I mean, for some of these companies, some of these clients, you’re the go-to person for their—
Lynch:
Couple of them.
Wig:
I mean, I’m just curious, that’s a lot of pressure to kind of be the one that’s, you’re kind of in charge of making sure everything’s working. Okay. How do you handle that? I don’t know.
Lynch:
I think one of the things that I think has really been good for me is I’m pretty calm. So I’m the one that when everything falls apart and everybody else is running around with their heads and their hands screaming, I usually tell them to leave the room and so I can close the door and I can fix the problem. As long as you can stay calm, even if your head is going, “Oh my God, how do I fix this? What do I do?” You don’t let that show. And in terms of feeling pressure, if people are screaming at me, it doesn’t go well because usually I will just disconnect from whatever it is we’re doing, but the clients that I have don’t do that. They’ve all known me. I’ve got clients I’ve had since 2006, and so they know me really well. They know that if I can help them, I will.
If I can’t help them, we’ll be putting a call into IBM and we’ll work it through. So a lot of those problems I just really don’t come up against. And I’ve had some bad situations where something’s really broken and I don’t know if I can actually fix it.
But over the years, for the work that I do for them, I develop techniques of making sure I have backups of my backups kind of thing. So there’s multiple ways to recover, but there’s always going to be the disc that crashes or something like that, and you just document ahead of time because they haven’t, how are you going to deal with them?
Yeah. And in terms of being on call, it’s kind of a weird thing because for some of the customers that I work with, I’m kind of like their level three support. They have their own admins and it’s really only when they get really stuck or they need a major upgrade that I have to do stuff. Then there’s others where there’s two of them I can think of where I’m their primary admin. So when they need stuff done, but they also understand what my timeframes are like and we work together to schedule them at a time that works for both of us. And it’s only really when they have a major problem and they will reach out to me and they all understand that they might not be able to get ahold of me for a couple hours. I could be on a plane to New Zealand, so that’s 13 hours that I’m not answering the phone and that’s just a given.
Wig:
Another thing I’m curious about is just kind of how you keep it going. I mean, having fun is part of it, part of to long … I think the key to longevity in any field is you have to be able to have some fun with it, right? Or when they’ve been doing this all this time. I mean, you mentioned kind of having, enjoying some of the problem solving aspects of it. I’m just kind of curious how you keep making sure you’re having some fun in all this.
Lynch:
So firstly, I really like what I do. I love solving problems. I’m very analytical. So I used to do logic puzzles for fun. I’m one of these people, I couldn’t decide what I was going to do when I got to the States. So I took this SAT, GRE and GMAT all within a week of each other, because I couldn’t decide what college I was going to go to or anything, and then I ended up doing something completely different. So I enjoy that kind of stuff. I enjoy learning. During the time that I was in Chicago, I actually did a degree and finished my degree in computer science, and then I did a degree in philosophy. And my master’s degree is actually a hybrid between computer science and philosophy, and it was on the ethics and virtual world, which my husband called an excuse to play computer games.
But the point that I’m trying to make is you’ve got to keep it different. The thing that I love about the job that I do is it’s never the same two days in a row. In fact, sometimes like today, I’ve dealt with three different clients already today and completely different things. So it keeps my brain going. And I think that’s the big thing to A, enjoy it. Secondly, to work with people that you like, and then thirdly, to have things be really different all the time. Some people can’t deal with that. They want stability. They want to do the same thing every day. I have a low boredom threshold, so for me, I’d go crazy.
Wig:
So I mean, being someone who’s kind of married philosophy and computer science, that kind of puts you in a good position to kind of have fun with these concepts and kind of think big about some of this stuff, I imagine. And so I always love that stuff. You bring that up that’s kind of tempting for me to go off on that whole direction, but the ethics of the virtual world, I think you said, what does that all entail?
Lynch:
So what a lot of people didn’t understand is that all of these virtual worlds, Eve, the SIMs, all of those, they all have social structures within them and they actually have social mores. So if you’re playing, for instance, World of Warcraft, and you end up in a group of people and you’re all like going and beating up on everybody else, there are rules for how you all interrelate. And when you break those rules, then bad things happen. And there was actually a case in, I forget which one it was because it’s been a while now, but where somebody actually infiltrated one of the groups, built up confidence and then managed to actually steal all their virtual assets and sell them. Now this sounds kind of weird, but what people didn’t realize was just Farmville alone with Zynga was over $5 million a year. Those virtual games with their assets are a multi-billion dollar world now, real money.
And then the other thing that was happening was in games like the Sims, they were actually finding child pornography rings and stuff like that. So they had to research a lot of that, that law enforcement was in there and they also used them to trial things. So as an example, Second Life, they actually had a Honda element in there, and that’s actually where Honda tested out people’s reactions to the Honda element to see what they thought of the car. So it was really a whole wide ranging of the things that you would see in a society. And most people think it’s the Wild, Wild West, but like I said, there are rules. And Second Life was the example where there were multiple people who made their whole living in second life. There was actually a woman who became a millionaire just selling land in second life that didn’t actually exist.
Wig:
No way.
Lynch:
And you could actually put money into Second Life and then take it out. They called Linden Dollars. So we’re going back a few years now. I think I wrote that in 2007 or something, but it was really a review. It was almost sociology rather than philosophy. And it looked into a lot of these societies and the rules around them that people didn’t realize existed and the ethics that were involved in the different behaviors. So you think of something like World of Warcraft as a very violent game where people are running around killing each other, but in fact, they had these whole social structures with rules. So not that they didn’t go around killing each other, but they picked.
Wig:
You’re playing World War Craft, you’re doing something that, yeah, if it were real, obviously not cool, but since it’s a game, very cool, but there’s this whole other set of rules that you have to follow that if you break those rules, that’s where you’re actually the bad person. Well,
Lynch:
Well, and I think too, too, it’s important to look at why people play the games. Now it’s gotten out of control, but my husband and I used to play Doom with each other, and the joke was that Doom saved our marriage, because when we’d get mad at each other, we’d basically sneak up on each other and shoot each other. Now, would I do that in real life? Absolutely not. But it was somewhat satisfying when he’d really annoyed me and vice versa.
So people take them too seriously now. I mean, you see people that will spend literally two days playing a game without going to bed. That’s not what we were doing, and that’s not really how it was back then, but it’s gotten out of control now. And I used to teach online safety, and I actually periodically go into the YMCA and teach internet safety to older people, and they just don’t understand how easy it is for people to glean way too much information that then allows them to take advantage of you. And unfortunately, the over-60s are the people that are being targeted.
Wig:
And now we’ve got AI and gen AI, a whole new set of ways to fool people.
Lynch:
Oh yeah. On Facebook—I’m a Formula One fan. So on Facebook, I see this picture of a whole lot of helicopters with Hamilton written on them and a picture of Lewis Hamilton and how he has flown all these helicopters in to help with disaster relief. Then two posts down, you see the same thing with the staphin on them and a picture of Max Verstappen and how he’s blown all these out? It’s like, these are all AI-generated. And even when you check on Facebook that you don’t want the AI stuff, you still get it. And you really can’t trust it. And then you get the deep fakes, which are even worse. So yeah, it really is the world, Wild West now.
Wig:
And you bring up trust and that’s a big factor in making AI work kind of at the enterprise level too, or in an IBM Power shop where people have to be able to work with these tools and trust that they are giving you the right results. Otherwise, you just bogged down and double checking everything. And then what’s the point?
Lynch:
And the problem with learning systems, whether you’re talking about the original learning machines or AI, we’ve had a saying since I started, garbage in, garbage out. And it’s true. If you want to have an AI system, it has to be trained properly so that it recognizes different horses or whatever, whatever it is you’ve got it trained on. And I don’t know how good we are at the training. And then we allow them to extrapolate from that and come up with their own conclusions. And we’re seeing some really weird AI stuff coming out because we’re not there yet. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s Power, Windows, as you, whatever. That’s the stuff that we really need to pay attention to. And also, how do you have AI make ethical recommendations? Because if it’s looking at things from a purely logical point of view, there’s no emotion in it and there’s no real context.
So it’s just going to look at the three different options that it has and it’s going to say, “Well, the best option from a utilitarian point of view is option one.” Well, option one might be the one where three people get killed to save eight. But what’s the value of those people? And that’s the stuff that when I was studying philosophy, we looked a lot at the utilitarian and not a big fan of it, because decisions are made for a very impersonal reason without really looking into all of the other factors. And AI doesn’t do emotions.
Wig:
There are things in ethics that you can’t quantify. So I get where you’re going with that. Last question I think I have for you, Jaqui. I’m curious what your clients are kind of telling you as they’re dealing with, I guess these current industry shifts. Maybe that stuff doesn’t get addressed a lot, but going back to the AI and actually operationalizing that, which has been a challenge I think at scale for a lot of businesses. Also like cloud shifts and that kind of thing too. And maybe I’m asking you to generalize a lot here, but like where are people’s heads at right now? How are people feeling about the current moment?
Lynch:
So I’m not dealing with the big Fortune 100 companies. They have their own like whole teams of people. Most of the companies that I’m dealing with kind of have AI on their radar, but they don’t trust it yet. So they’re not going to put their production and have it be depending on AI. In terms of like Power systems, things like that, they’re looking at staying current. I have a variety of customers, some that will never upgrade because they keep saying they’re getting rid of their systems and 10 years later they’re still here.
Then I have others that allow me to keep them current. And staying current means it’s really easy when a devaluation cycle comes around or when you need to take advantage of something in the technology that requires an upgrade, it’s really easy to do it. So it really does vary by customer and it also varies by what the competition is like for them.
So if you’re in a very competitive environment, then you want to take advantage of every little step that you could take to put you ahead of the other guys. So customers are very, they’re variable. Medical companies tend to be very, very conservative. And if you’re a hospital, you don’t want to be doing upgrades unless there’s something of an advantage because your doctors that need to have reliable systems. That’s the one thing that Power is very good at. It’s extremely reliable as long as it’s properly architected. If you architect it with a single VIO server that’s dependent on one internal disk, good luck to you. But if you architect it properly with two of them and do the mirroring, et cetera, you’re going to have an incredibly reliable system. And that’s what they’re saying about the Power 11s. They targeted them for six nines. And I can believe that.
I’ve had to reboot servers that have not been rebooted for 1,780 days. Now you think about that and it’s terrifying, right? But it actually says something very positive that IBM put out a system that could stay up for 1,780 days, but it really sucks when you’re the person that has to reboot that LPAR. It’s like, will it come up?
Wig:
Okay. So when that happens, like what are they facing in that scenario? What kind of task is in front of that person?
Lynch:
So it depends on why we’re rebooting it, but let’s say we’re rebooting it because they want me to do an upgrade on it. When it hasn’t been rebooted for that long, I won’t touch it until it’s been rebooted because I’m not going to get blamed for it breaking when it wasn’t something I did. But what we usually do is we’ll take a clone to a second disc and that way we know that it can build a boot image. We’ll rebuild the boot image to make sure that it will actually boot. Probably take a makes us be as well, like I said, belts and suspenders, and then reboot it. And you’ve got to have a plan in place if it doesn’t come up. But when you talk to the customer, they also understand that we’re just doing a plane reboot. What would happen if it crashed? Would it come back? So let’s find out now in a controlled environment during a maintenance window when we have time to recover. Let’s not find out in the middle of your production day when suddenly people can’t get money from, I don’t know, an ATM or something.
Wig:
So yeah, if you’re going to shut things down momentarily, make sure it’s controlled, I guess. Exactly. That makes a lot of sense.
Lynch:
And I get asked a lot of times to come and do an upgrade of somebody’s system or fix something on it. And nine times out of 10 when I look at it, if it hasn’t been rebooted for a long time, like I said earlier, my first response is, “We need to schedule a reboot first. Let’s make sure it’s healthy before we make any changes.”
Wig:
First thing’s first. All right. Well, Jaqui, I think that just about does it here for us. I really appreciate you coming on the show. And for our audience, well, thanks for tuning into another episode of IT Social Hour. I hope you’ve all enjoyed hearing about Jaqui’s colorful career and her fascinating work life and insights into her interactions with clients.
And I also want to let you know that you can find all of her work at techchannel.com. Maybe not all of it, but a lot of it. She writes for us on a pretty regular basis, all sorts of how-tos. You wrote one about setting up your power and electricity for your Power 11 upgrades and all that kind of stuff. So go to TechChannel to find that. And really, the best way to make sure you don’t miss anything is to subscribe to our newsletter. You can find that by visiting techchannel.com/subscribe.
So yeah, that’ll do it. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Jaqui. And we will see you next time.
Lynch:
Thank you.