Sun Comes Up Over Silicon Valley

The Morning Skies of Silicon Valley Hosted on Zooomr

Saturday 1:30 a.m. the phone rings in the middle of the night.

Kristopher: "Dude, Zooomr's down."

Me: "Huh, what time is it?"

Kristopher: "It's 1:30 a.m., Zooomr's down, we have to go down to the data center.

Me: "Ugh, dude I'm asleep. I just went to bed 30 minutes ago. I have to be up early this morning to head down to Photowalking with Scoble."

Kristopher: "Yeah man, I know, but Zooomr's down. We have to go down to the data center.

Me: "Ok, I'll be there in 20 minutes."

So I swing by SF, pick up Kristopher and we drive down to our data center at Savvis in Sunnyvale. Grumbling most of the way. Driving is tough.

"Just stay awake!" Kristopher reminds me as I drift out a few times on the way down.

We get to the data center, check in, and Kristopher gets to work.

"Crap," he says, it's worse than I thought. A drive's gone down. More hacking on the computer at the data center. A twitter here and there on my part (I'm pretty useless on these calls except as chaufer).

Finally we fix the problem. Take the bad drive offline. And wrap up at about 5am. As we head out we joke with the guy at the data center about these capsules that you go in and out of at Savvis. They are like something out of star trek. Little phone booth type doorways that seal you off as you go in and out of the data center. Once he said, three guys from Google got stuck in one of them. Another time he tells us that one guy freaked out who was claustrophobic and had a collapse in there. They had to call the paramedics to get him out.

He hands us our IDs back and we say bye. Good night he says. No, good morning, Kristopher laughs back. Ok, now, goodnight, he says back.

And then we get in the car. We drive past this big ass building with Yahoo on it and both laugh. Then Krisopher lays back in the seat to try to sleep while I've got Van Morrison blaring on the radio and I pull out my 5D and snap the photograph above.

My friend Dave Sifry says someday this will be one of those great stories that our employees will love hearing us tell. I sure hope he's right.