The Art of Working Fast in Tough Conditions
YESTERDAY there was a very obnoxious (and very rare) outage in our area. Power came down and back up at unexpected times, putting electronic equipment at risk or in danger of data loss (some sort of outages can blow fuses and components; some can cause file system inconsistencies). Either way, we powered down a lot of our equipment until the local crew managed to replace the faulty parts, impacting perhaps 100 homes around us (radius about 200m).
In the process I decided they cannot be relied upon (no message sent from them until 4 hours later!) and thought, "hey, who the heck knows how long will this last for?"
Of course since they've abolished landlines and instead supplied some "smart" IP-based handsets (that charge a lot of money) we could not even call emergency services. No power? No Internet. No phone. No Internet but power still on? Still no phone. In the days of the copper-based connections this was not an issue.
On the upside, I managed to rearrange all the computers, neatly organised all the wires, and ended up with the typical setup of 6 computers and 10 monitors on my desk. The server is safety stored under a shelf, the alarm clock found a better position, and there was lots of cleaning up afterwards.
A lot of time was lost yesterday. Things we planned to publish were either delayed or never published. It's sort of difficult to work when one lacks the very basics, such as power supply, connection to the Web etc. Heck, we lost power and Internet access exactly when I posted a new page to this site, and very much in the middle of the process. I thought it would damage the database and could not verify all was OK until after the power came back.
Today we're back to high efficiency. We caught up with the news, we now write some original material, and monitoring of this site improved. There's a whole monitor devoted to it. █