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Christopher's team and he worked nonstop. Well nonstop is relative, between the hours of 9am and 5pm they worked non-stop with some at-home fiddling in between. It got the job done, everything was in Chris' liking for the release date which was that Saturday on Memorial Day weekend. People were lining up at shopping malls waiting for the midnight release of the first game and device that allowed for a 100% immersive experience, you're body literally became part of the game.
It was an overtime night for everyone, all the coders that worked on the project in all the facilities of IDEXX Labs, All the sysadmins, all the high brass of the company and their stakeholders were gathered in each facilities conference room for congratulations and to triage any immediate problems. In Portland Maine Christopher Motiva and his local team were sitting around the conference table, listening and smiling to the CEO of the company congratulating them and the army of developers for all their hard work in making this a reality.
"I really enjoyed working on this project, I know myself and my team as well as the DevOps team are really excited for tonight" Chris stood and addressed everyone in the room "As far as my department goes we've planned for a very high concentration of traffic tonight as people try out their hardware, they need to get home from the midnight release to plug it in first though, so we're assuming around 1AM is when we will see the most account creation traffic, then the game traffic will begin. I've gone ahead and closed off the database for logins at the moment and I believe the DevOps earlier today worked at making sure anyone left was forced to log out for any final work."
The man still in t-shirt and jeans in contrast to everyone else's formal attire spoke up "Yes that's exactly right, as we can see on the board here" The room's attention turned to the television screen on the back wall with graphs and charts displaying system utilization and a live log of activity. "there's only 1 user active and that's the GM's account from Japan, so he's been granted special permission to be in-game when other players join, as Mister Motiva said, we're all excited, we've worked long hours on our slice of the pie and are eager to see what happens"
What happens? Chris thought, what does that mean?
Hours passed, news reports on the wall showed reporters on scene at the midnight release and people pouring into the shopping centers, ravenously throwing credit cards and cash at the store clerks trying to be the first on this system, Chris shook his head, the news media had brought in a live feed to their conference room and the CEO and his executives were live counting down until the flood gates opened for login requests "Five…. Four…." Chris looked to his laptop and the screen filling with refused login attempts as the database rejected their attempts to bypass its administrator's barrier on use "Three… Two…." Chris hits enter on a command to his database he had ready "DB_LOCK=OFF" and the boards light up with users smashing onto the system, all creating accounts.
Chris kept a careful eye on his system, the load balancer doing its job, all smoothly routing people to various data centers to ensure even distribution of resources as well as a fast experience. He nodded as the time was coming for them to leave. 2:30 AM, he was tired the CEOs had already left, the DevOps were packing up and leaving "Alright guys, lets head home, keep your phones on just in case but let them have their fun" "alright, sounds good" Was the resounding reply from the other members of the team, all were yawning and stretching as they all walked out of the dark building and to their cars and started the drive home to catch a weekend's sleep. "Check it in the morning, more than I thought wow… games I guess" Chris said to himself as he drove it was rather surprising to him that he user count stayed relatively steady and didn't diminish as he assumed people would play for a little while and then go to bed, but he just assumed it must be because it's the weekend and their excited.
John Andrews, Police sergeant for the Portland Police department was sitting in his brand new Ford Explorer Police interceptor in a subway parking lot. Being the supervisor of the night shift this week he too this time to look over some reports and incoming incidents and see what his men for up to… a army of 10 tonight because of the holiday. He had 2 units keeping a presence at the shopping centers to make sure things didn't get out of hand, when everything settled down it was a normal night in the city, busy but not overly so. As he was in the middle of typing out a report to fraud complaint he got earlier his radio piped up with the voice of the dispatcher "403, and 421 I'll take you too"
The other officer piped up answering the call "403" Peter Hussey, new cadet but is going places. John keys up his radio "421" John had been on the force for over 15 years and loved his job and was on his way to becoming a Lieutenant before long. The dispatcher piped up again "Can you guys slide on over to the Tara Apartments…. Apartment 12B Bravo…. I have a female on the line she's concerned about her son, 17 year old male, he's put on the new gaming helmet that was released tonight and doesn't know why he isn't detaching from that… she'd like a welfare check and to speak with an officer… 421 I put you on this call the CAD is pulling this card since it's calling it a possible major medical issue, do you want me to start MEDCU yet or no"
With a single flip of a switch the vehicle lit up brilliantly with blue strobe lights enough to blind a man, and he started down the road quickly for that address. He keys up his radio "Negative, we'll check welfare first and advice"
John pondered the call to himself as he drove "Why not just pull it off the kid..." He shrugged and continued his driving to the assigned address prepared to do just that.