No show 15 Aug 2025: There's been a flood

Cars and emergency vehicles are submerged in a flooded Milwaukee street during the Great Flood of 2025. The text "NO SHOW THIS WEEK" crosses the center of the image. The fuchsia Phoole and the Gang flag logo floats in the lower right corner.

No shows from either the Urban Love Ulcer or me this week, I'm afraid.

My dayjob is managing a city government call center - we help callers with everything from sanitation collections to street light outages to potholes and much more.

Last Friday, I had the day off from the dayjob, having worked four 10-hour days already. About halfway through the day, the application my team uses to submit requests and manage the city's relationships with residents, an application for which I am pretty much the sole admin, stopped working in a few highly-important ways - requests stopped automatically generating the code they needed to generate in order to transfer; requests stopped updating their statuses automatically; many other automations failed; images wouldn't attach to requests; reports wouldn't load; user lists wouldn't load.

My team didn't pick up on this. That's normal - these things have never all broken at once. A supervisor noticed that a report wasn't exporting, but we put it down to a normal cloud SaaS thing that happens from time to time.

On Saturday morning, recovering from Phoole & the Gang, I idly checked to see if that report would export - and I found everything broken, and hundreds of requests were backlogged. I sent critical support tickets to the application's vendor, who I knew would be gone all weekend and wouldn't see them until Monday, and frantically set about trying to manually force requests to transfer.

After a couple of hours, I could at least manually get the requests to generate the integration code needed to transfer, but I couldn't get it to work automatically. I had to push each one separately.

And then...it started to rain.

Milwaukee got drowned in a 1,000-year flood. 10 inches (25.4 cm) of rain fell in fewer than 24 hours. Hundreds of requests reporting flooding basements, city trees down across busy streets, flooded roadways, and streetlight outages poured in, and I was the only person in the world who could push them through, to get them to the Public Works divisions that needed that information to manage public safety.

I worked non-stop for 26 hours.

At about 4:00 in the morning on Sunday, I began to flag a little. I had to grit my teeth and growl to myself, "You like doing difficult things. You like doing difficult things. Ten more. Now ten more."

From 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., between batches of pushed requests, I struggled to draft a rough process guide for the request-push workaround I had developed on the fly for getting requests to transfer. It was so hard to do. When I'm working normally, I can exhale 40-page illustrated process guides; but I was really ragged and felt like I would die.

At 8:00 in the morning, my team's Saturday shift arrived; I sent out my guide and deputized my agents to help me push requests through, but that was nonsense. They had so many calls to deal with that there was no way for them to shift to helping me out. I took a nap anyway, two hours, and let requests pile up. I reckoned crews were probably already overwhelmed - the windows of my house looked like someone had a firehose pointing at them on full blast, on every side of the house - so even if they got these requests, they wouldn't be able to address any of them any time soon.

At 10:00 a.m. I crawled out of bed, back to my desk, and pushed requests until I passed out around 10:00 p.m. I got up at 5:00 a.m. the next day and started pushing requests again.

This week, my first shift lead is on vacation, camping in remote wilderness, and my first shift supervisor has endured not one, but two deaths in their family. So not only did I have to manage through a 1000-year flood, I had to do it pretty much alone.

My team received 3,567 calls on Monday. Normally they handle between 800 and 1,000 calls on any given Monday. It was the second busiest day in the call center's history - back in 2014, before I joined the center, they had a 4,067 call day, exactly 500 calls more. Huh. Weird. Anyhow, that's too many calls for a fourth-tier city.

To their credit, the vendor leapt into action early Monday, and by Monday afternoon, they had requests transferring automatically again, and they had some statuses auto-updating. By yesterday, they had report exporting repaired and user lists accessible again. I know something is still broken, but I can't remember what it is. I'll have to dig through tickets and notes.

As always happens during crises, 20 different city divisions came at us with 20 wildly-different directives for how things need to be tracked, with no coordination between silos, just chaos. I'm happy to have been with the city long enough to know that that's just going to happen, and we just have to chain ourselves to the ship's wheel and ride out the storm, pushing back on directives that don't make sense and make things worse, adapting to helpful directives, having the wisdom to know the difference.

Throughout all of this, freakishly, my internet-dj brain kept happily chortling at me about Songs That Would Be Great In a Show About Flooding.

But reality is that the aftermath of this flood will keep me working every day this week and probably through the weekend again, and there's no way I can do a show this week.

Hopefully next Friday we can have an Under-the-Sea dance or some other dire and ghastly flood theme. Please plumb the depths of the archives at https://phoole.com/rewind in the meantime!