When a mission-critical server dies at a business, the timeline can best be described using the first thing that a person says when they call your cell phone. It went something like this:

Day 1: “I wouldn’t be calling you at 5 AM unless it was really important….”

Day 2: “You won’t believe this, but all three of the hot spare drives in the old database server are bad – when’s the new server coming again?”

Day 3: “Dell says the new server that was supposed to arrive last week still hasn’t been built yet.”

Day 4: “The good news is that the server is covered under a four-hour service agreement, the bad news is that the hard drives are covered under a next-business-day support agreement, and the worse news is that since Good Friday is a holiday, the next business day is Monday.”

In more pleasant news, here’s a picture of little Ernie taken by Erika.