Opening: 1980s CorpBank MENA, Late Wednesday Afternoon
It was just past 1:00pm on a dry and dusty Wednesday afternoon in the heart of the Middle East. As the last of the tellers closed their counters and the glass doors of CorpBank MENA’s regional office swung shut, the office floor exhaled its weekday breath. Staff began their quiet exodus into the long weekend, Thursday and Friday were sacred rest days in this part of the world. But for the unsung heroes in the bank’s operations and technology teams, the work was just beginning.
By 6:00pm, the night operations shift had taken their places in the humming, dimly lit back office. Tape drives spun. Terminals blinked. Programs queued. The offline update cycle, the heart of the bank’s daily reconciliation and reporting process, began its carefully choreographed dance. Reemers, a meticulous but occasionally overconfident operator, was at the helm, managing the critical mid-sequence programs that updated the master files and prepared departmental reports.
Then it happened.
A soft beep. An error prompt. Program End of Task 404, the Customer History (CUSTHIST) updater had failed. Reemers, frowning, made a judgment call. He reran the program, but skipped a vital step: restoring the online file before reprocessing. Within minutes, a silent tremor passed through the system. The database, no longer in sync with its history log, panicked. And then, crash.
Panic spread across the operations room like a spilled cup of coffee. Ali, the shift supervisor, was summoned. Ravi, Jose, and Steve gathered around the console. Screens flickered. Commands were tried, backups probed. Nothing worked.
That’s when the call was made: “Get Dimitri. Fuzzy. Anil. And Hassan.”
The cavalry was coming.
Thursday Morning: Enter the Tech Team
Fuzzy arrived first, still buttoning the sleeves of his shirt, a faint smell of late-night tea clinging to his breath. Anil followed with a folder of printed logs under his arm, already deep in thought. Hugh, precise, quiet, and always skeptical, carried his toolkit like a doctor arriving at the scene of an emergency. And Dimitri, with his thick Greek accent and sharper-than-average instinct for hardware anomalies, had flown in from a branch audit just the day before. The veterans of CorpBank MENA’s Technology Division were now assembled. The air in the operations room had shifted, hope, tension, and caffeine mixed in equal measure.
The history behind the recent changes made to the database were discussed. The CUSTHIST file was growing extremely large and managing all its data in one single database file was not the right way to go as it could easily fall apart. In addition, the database which was a single dB, named DMS, was also split into two as DMS1 and DMS2 in order to minimize its individual size. The dB was composed of a flat file system running on OS/32. The total disk storage space available at the time was only 600MB. So it was decided, after much discussion and consensus, a few months back to split the CUSTHIST file into two segments and hold each on DMS1 and DMS2 respectively. This was implemented successfully and was running fine without any glitch.
Ali briefed the team quickly about the events that led to the crash which had corrupted the database. The recovery logs were incomplete. And nobody could confirm whether Wednesday’s transactions had been properly committed before the failure. Dimitri's fingers danced across the terminal. He pulled up the file structure, it was like seeing a living body with a faint but erratic heartbeat.
“This isn’t just an error,” Hugh murmured. “It’s a synchronization mess. We’ll need to go manual.”
Over the next 12 hours, the team dived into the entrails of the system. They examined core files, update triggers, trailer records, and session timestamps. Backup tapes were mounted and remounted, looking for clean recovery points. Some sectors restored; others refused to comply. What made things worse: the audit trail, which logged every program’s progress, was also fragmented.
By Thursday night, sleep was a luxury. They took turns resting in the small, air-conditioned prayer room on the side of the branch. At one point, Dimitri sat on the floor with a notepad in his lap, drawing out the logical chain of events that could have led to the desync. Still, the system remained unbootable.
The team had to contact their homes and make alternate arrangements for their domestic needs that were planned for the weekend to be carried on using friends, neighbors and other system support staff. The children needed to attend their weekend activities. The wives needed to do marketing. The wheels had to be kept on turning, both at work and at home.
Calls were made to the MENA Technology HQ in Athens. By Friday morning, reinforcements, led by Jean the Chief of Systems Management, were on a flight to the Gulf.
As the sun set on the second day, Fuzzy looked up from the console and said quietly, “If we don’t get this up before Saturday 8:00am, it’s not just our heads that will roll. The branches open in three hours.”
Friday Night: The Breakthrough
By now, Jean and the Athens team had joined the exhausted troops on the ground. Five more engineers, fresh but unfamiliar with the local configuration, huddled over thick binders and system diagrams. One of them, a lanky systems analyst named Yannis, asked the question no one had thought to revisit:
“What about the trailer record timestamp? Did anyone check that?”
Fuzzy blinked.
The trailer record was a tiny but essential part of the transaction log, a summary entry that marked the official end of the update process. If the timestamp was wrong or corrupted, the system would believe the database was still mid-run, essentially stuck in limbo, waiting for a session that never completed.
He dove back into the logs. The timestamp on the trailer record read: 23:59:72, an impossible time.
“Bloody hell,” muttered Anil. “It’s a leap second error. That explains the mismatch.”
With a mixture of disbelief and relief, the team edited the trailer record manually, using the Edit32 utility, resetting the timestamp to the correct closing time: 23:59:59. Then came the moment of truth.
The system was rebooted.
Fans whirred. Drives spun. Lines of code scrolled down the central monitor.
And then, a soft ping.
Database integrity: Verified.
But it wasn’t over yet.
The full offline update sequence for Wednesday had to be rerun. Every transaction. Every report. Every reconciliation. It was already 4:00am Saturday. They had under four hours to get it all done before the first branch in Riyadh flicked on its lights and unlocked its doors.
The room transformed into a command center. Operators were recalled. Tapes loaded. Printers roared. It was a relay race between machines and men.
By 7:30 AM, the last report slid off the dot matrix printer. Systems green. Data synced. Departments notified.
At 7:55am, Ali leaned back in his chair, eyes closed.
At 8:00am sharp, CorpBank MENA opened for business, not a customer the wiser.
Present Day: Reflections from the CorpBank WhatsApp Group
Four decades later, the world runs on cloud servers, mobile apps, and AI-driven automations. But in our CorpBank MENA Alumni WhatsApp group, time occasionally loops backward. Just yesterday, someone casually mentioned "that weekend the system went belly-up in ’86”, and before long, the messages were flying, photos of old punch cards, memories of Reemers’ fateful rerun, jokes about how much Greek coffee we drank, and how we all looked like zombies by Saturday morning.
We laughed. We remembered. And we honored something quietly heroic.
What we did back then wasn’t glamorous. We had no LinkedIn posts or startup equity or public recognition. But we carried systems, and sometimes whole institutions, on our backs through sleepless nights, lines of raw code, and sheer force of will. And somehow, we did it together, without losing our sanity or our friendship.
Looking back, that 48-hour recovery wasn't just a technical feat. It was a symbol of what made us who we were: a team that showed up, held the line, and kept the lights on. Without fanfare. Without fail.
And sometimes, when I close my eyes before dawn, I dream of terminals blinking, printers humming, and a small group of men and women on the second floor of the Mashaal building in the Gulf, rewriting time, one timestamp at a time.