This has happened to most of us...

You come to work one day. Everything seems normal: the sun is shining, birds are chirping, but you notice a couple of weird things on your way to work like deja vu with cat in matrix.

You get into office, there are a lot of phones ringing, but could be that they are just doing a new sales promotion. You settle in, when you notice a dark cloud hovering over you.

It takes you a couple of moments, but you recognize the cloud is your boss. Usually he checks on you every morning with his "Soooo Peeeeter, how about those TCP/IP reports?" routine, but today he forgot everything about common manners and rudely invaded your personal space. No "Good Morning", just some drooling, grunts and curses. He reminds you a bit of neanderthal who is trying to get away from cyber tooth tiger, fear and panic all compressed in a tight ball. You try to decipher the new language that he created since yesterday and you start understanding that something bad happened overnight - production system went down.

Now, your system is usually used by clients during regular working hours from 9-5, but for whatever reason you didn't get any alerts on your beeper (for people under 30 - beeper was like a mobile phone that could only ring and tell you who beeped you). Need to remember to charge it next time.

So it is 8:45am, the system MUST be up at 9am. Every 10 seconds, your boss lets out yet another curse which communicates to you that another customer is having problems getting into the system. Also several account managers are now hovering over your boss trying to make him understand how clients are REALLY REALLY suffering.

Everyone is depending on you to get the system up ASAP and at the same time hinder your progress by constantly distracting you.

How do you keep cool in a situation like this?