The terror of everyone working in this industry: end of day and especially their crashes. Because end of days happen at nights, most of the time everything is automated. Reports, market data copy, accounting generation are all these lovely activities which happen during the night and which are supposed to be a well-oiled mechanic.

Murex has come a long way in terms of End of day issues (EOD for the acronym lovers). When I started, the big fear was the future rollout date as the system would often crash and one would need to sort it out manually, undo what was done and redo manually. Fortunately in 15 years,  if the EODs have become more complex due to stronger requirements, the system has proven to be also a lot more reliable and resilient.

I won’t cover how to debug these issues (that was another post earlier, the search function is your friend!), but the funny cases (well, looking at them now is funny) that I had encounter.

Calling my wife. A customer had my wife number (I had given it to them when my phone was broken) but few years after, they were still calling her for EOD issues. Quite a classic, when it’s 11pm and my wife is awoken with questions she can’t understand.

Missing cutoff times. Such a big stress the first times. GL entries need to be posted by 12am or… Your first times, guesses are that it is the end of the world, bank will go bust, another black Thursday will happen. So when an issue happens, massive panic and how to get everything rolling before the cutoff. Later you learn that the world will keep going if the data to the ledger is late. Not ideal, but not a cause for WW3.

Leveraging of someone’s visit. This happened actually quite a few times. When visiting a customer and the day is closing, I got a call from the office asking to help someone for a small problem. I then spent few hours (finishing just before midnight) to solve that “small” problem that was end of day related. Other variations include saying bye to everyone and being asked if I could help on this tiny matter.

This being said, that’s an aspect of the job I like (and I hate as well). You need to be always on your toes and it’s actually good fun to be at the customer that late: very few people in (and most lights turned off) and quite a relaxed atmosphere.

And you? How much did you enjoy your night shifts?