by Serguey Shinder
For most of my career the word people used about me in incidents was calm. It was in three separate appraisals. A director once told a room that the reason she slept through outages was that I sounded the same at three in the morning as I did at lunch. I took it as a compliment and worked at it. I kept my voice level, my messages short, and my worry to myself.
In November 2022 a storage array in our main data centre began reporting errors on one disk and then, over the following hour, on a second. I looked at it, understood that one more failure would take our order database with it, and wrote in the operations channel: probably worth someone having a look at the array when they get a moment. That was, in my vocabulary, an alarm. I had meant it as one.
Nobody moved for forty minutes. The engineer on call finished what he was doing first. My manager saw the message, read my usual tone, and went back to his meeting. The third disk did not fail, and we replaced the other two that night, but for forty minutes the most dangerous thing in the building was being treated as housekeeping, and the reason was me.
Afterwards the engineer said something I have not forgotten. He said he could never tell from me whether something was bad, because everything sounded the same. He had learned to ignore my tone entirely and wait for somebody else to panic.
That was the part I had not understood. I had thought of calm as a quality I was bringing to the room. To everybody else it was a signal, and a signal that never changes carries no information. By making my manner a constant I had not removed the worry from incidents. I had removed the only way anybody could learn how worried to be, and left them to work it out from people who were less composed and less informed.
I have not become an anxious person. What I changed was to stop relying on tone for anything that matters. When something is serious I now say how serious, in words, at the start of the message: this is urgent, or this can wait until the morning, and why. For incidents we agreed a short scale that the whole team uses, so that my level three means the same as anybody else's and does not depend on how my voice sounds. The first time I wrote this is urgent in the channel, two people rang me within a minute to ask what was wrong, which told me how rarely I had ever said it.
Composure is still useful. It keeps people thinking clearly. It just cannot be the whole message, and for years I had let it be, and called that a virtue.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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