Daylight Savings Time War Story

My boss walked past my desk and said "there's a problem" without stopping.

I grabbed my laptop and caught up with him. We didn't talk on the way. Just walked fast through the open office, down a hallway, into the infrastructure area where the lights were low and it was loud in a way I wasn't used to. I would find out later it was always like that back there. I was used to the quiet, almost spa-like calm of the software engineering side. This was a different world.

He led me into a glass-walled room with monitors on every wall and a tall standing table in the center with a conference phone on it. Big bosses already in there. Infrastructure engineers with laptops open. And the wizard dev from my team, eyes fixed on his screen, fingers flying, mumbling updates as he worked. The CEO's pet project was down in production and everyone was waiting for someone to find it.

I put my laptop down and started asking questions. Not "what changed?" Too broad. I went specific first: the code, the deployment, the config. When everything checked out I started pulling back. What changed in the environment? What changed in the world?

The room started joining in. It got louder and more chaotic and honestly more effective because of it. Questions bouncing around, everyone pulling on different threads at the same time. At some point daylight saving time came up and someone said "did the code account for it?" and the wizard checked and said "yeah, that's it."

I don't remember exactly who landed on it but it doesn't matter. We found it together and that's how it's supposed to work.

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