I was on a remote late-night troubleshooting session with my teammates. We were all on the edge. Our site was crashing, during peak usage hours, for the fifth straight time in as many days.
It was my birthday. I left the office early to spend some time with my family. Me and another teammate (who incidentally shares a birthday with me) did some system config changes, and we both left the office early. Then shortly after we left the site crashed. And my teammates who happened to be available, even if they weren’t the best resource people - they weren’t actually sysads, they were programmers - had to cover up for us and troubleshoot. Our config changes were primary suspect, of course, and the poor programmers had to google for tweaks into our new config.
They eventually called me up, to notify me of the problem and indirectly tell me that the boss wants me to join the troubleshooting. I was in transit when they called me, so they had to do more googling for one hour before I eventually joined them.
When I got home and got online, I barged into the discussion and said something like “No, that solution won’t work.” I was correct, but those were the wrong words to say to programmers who were googling their way to sysad competency to fix a troubled system whose stability wasn’t their primary responsibility anyway.
Good thing I quickly realized my mistake and said my apologies. I’m not good at apologies, so I just said something like “I barged into the discussion and I’m impolite to start by saying No. I know next to nothing to what’s going on, so please enlighten me.” It somehow worked. It worked on my teammates, who accepted the apology and went back to focusing on solving the problem (or at least handing over the problem with as much details as they can give). It also worked on me, as I got back to focusing on the problem instead of ranting privately about issues with my teammates, our recruitment problems - why we still don’t have a night shift sysad, and so on.
The apology started as a shallow one. I just wanted to apologize, give apologetic words, even if I truly wasn’t that apologetic. However, once I started typing those words, it took on its own momentum, and I realized my mistake and became truly apologetic and grateful for the help that my teammates did in covering up for my haphazard sysad work.
Words are powerful. If we believe in them, they can change our mindset, our attitude. If others believe in them, they can change the world.