The “Patman,” MY NY Giants, and the Super Bowl Shuffle

Fiddle Diddle! Fiddle Diddle! Fiddle Diddle! Fiddle Diddle! DIDDLE FIDDLE!!!

If I only had a fiddle—and I’d want to make sure it was a big viola—I’d take my bow and beat the little Patriots’ hula doll of the “Patman” (not to be confused with the “Pacman” of the Tennessee Titans) into a thousand little Patriot pieces. There it was, Super Bowl Sunday, and a record 97.5 million viewers tuned in to see David bring down Goliath—the “invincible” New England Patriots fell to MY New York GIANTS! I’ll get back to this story in a moment.

How About Them GIANTS!!!

Almost from my entry into the world from my mother’s womb, I have been a NY Giants fanatic. I grew up hearing stories from my father, who had grown up in Long Island, about “The Game” between the Baltimore Colts and NY Giants (1958 NFL Championship Game), the first passer—Y.A. Tittle—to have consecutive 30-touchdown seasons, the most physical linebacker—Sam Huff—to ever play the game…the list is almost endless.

And my teenage years were filled watching the best line-backing trio—Lawrence Taylor, Harry Carson, and Carl Banks—to ever play the game, one of the most efficient passers—Phil Simms—including the highest passing efficiency in a Super Bowl, to play (and win!) a Super Bowl, and the passing catching TE duo of Zeke Mowatt and Mark Bavaro win two Super Bowls in the late 1980s.

So along comes the Super Bowl I had waited to arrive since that dismal day in Tampa in January 2000, when Ray Lewis and his Ravens’ defense devoured Kerry Collins and the rest of the NY Giants offense. But as soon as MY GIANTS whooped the cheeseheads and Bret Farve hobbled off the frozen tundra in Green Bay to produce another Wrangler commercial in the offseason, I’d been counting the days…no hours…no minutes…no seconds until the Super Bowl of the ages. Thought never again possible, an unbeaten team, for the first time in 35 years, swaggered into the Super Bowl. And MY GIANTS were going to stop history from happening.

The “Patman”

But then IT happened…the “Patman” entered the building. Ever since HIS Patriots traded for Randy Moss on draft day in April, the “Patman” had been pontificating on the invincibility of his “Team of the Decade” (or “Team of the Century” by the time the season came to an end). And as if all of the Patriots’ “garbage” in his cube, all the way from in a dancing Patriots’ hula doll that he had picked up at a Super Bowl party after the Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXVI to figurines of George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi (don’t even ask where he found it), and a couple of other historical dignitaries wearing Patriots’ insignia, he decided to install a “Patriots’ Team of the Decades” screensaver on his desktop. The only problem is that it contained a malicious virus that infiltrated our network and took down eight desktops and laptops in the executive suite, including the “Warlord’s, along with our Microsoft Exchange environment.

For nearly 48 grueling hours that weekend my staff and I were hunched over workstations and laptops, as well as Exchange servers in the data center, rebuilding each one—bit by bit. And it didn’t help that the Patriots’ hula doll sitting on the top shelf of the Patman’s cube was in direct view of my cube; hence, every time I stood up to go to the kitchen, rest room, or data center, the first thing I saw was that whacky dacky doll (bordering on recollections of Freddy Kruger from “Nightmare on Elmstreet”).

The Super Bowl “Shuffle”

So I did see a Super Bowl of sorts—in fact, my staff and I danced the “Super Bowl Shuffle,” and I must say as well or better than William (“The Fridge”) Perry and his 1985 Chicago Bears team. It was the shuffle to restore all systems and servers before the start of business Monday morning or hear the Warlord preach to us about how IT is a necessary evil and cower in the corner under a barrage of catcalls from thousands of employees who would discover they had no email access upon arriving first thing in the morning.

And—lucky break—there to “coach” me and my team on Sunday were two members of the Warlord’s staff who needed critical emails from the downed server so that they could finish a presentation due the next day to investors. They couldn’t quite understand my explanation that it takes hours and dozens of steps to manually rebuild a Microsoft Exchange-based server and its database. How, they wondered, could a process require so many reboots?

I actually wonder that myself. Thankfully, we managed to escape being clobbered by a crowd at the opening of business on Monday by finishing all restorations by about 6 a.m. 

Patman Goes a Packing…and Not for Cheeseheads

Yet despite missing the Super Bowl, I had a DR plan in place. When I had received news of the system failure on Friday evening, I quickly activated my TiVo to record the Super Bowl, which I then planned to watch—without any knowledge of the actual outcome—after finishing the workstation, laptop, and data center rebuilds. This plan worked like a charm until we restored the Exchange environment and the email from the Patman started to roll in. He had sent email attributing the loss to poor officiating. I thus crawled home at 6 a.m. on Monday morning for two hours of sleep, oblivious to the recording on the TiVo, before heading back into the data center at 10 a.m. for an M&A meeting with the Warlord and his staff.

My only consolation was the sight of the Patman when I returned to the building. (You should have seen him. I haven’t seen such a sad sight in some time.) The loss the prior day was bad enough for him. But the Warlord, who was livid when he found out that the Patman had caused the system failure with his Patriots screensaver, made him pack up his Patriot gear first thing in the morning, including the infamous hula doll!

See ya later hula doll...

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Yet one thing that no solution can restore: Sitting down with chips, dip, and a cold beer to watch your team play live in the Super Bowl. To you and so many others in IT who have spent long weekends at work—we hope every company can truly appreciate the difference you make. It’s our goal to enable you to be home more often.