Among the bridges
By an odd set of coincidences, I came into contact with bridges today. Not the historical variety, carrying the world across a stream, but the newfangled, telecommunicational kind that link faces across a distance. One bridge worked. The other never got a chance. I didn’t expect either when the day started, but that’s what gives form to coincidental moments.
I’d been apprised that I might have to meet with some people from outside our tiny corporate world, and so when the two young consultants from the observatory arrived I wasn’t taken completely by surprise. Still, an observatory. On a mountaintop in another country. Not your ordinary moment in the usual day. There was no chance to learn about their work (that may come after the start of the new year), but I helped them prepare for a videoconference test.
The test failed. Our end was fine, the other not so much. Apparently a fire had broken out in the computing centre at a fine university, and their video bridge was suddenly out of service. We didn’t even have a chance to try for a busy signal. I wonder if I can find out the back story with some careful Googling. Maybe tomorrow.
We were supposed to have a snow storm today. We had the snow, but the storm element was (sadly) missing. Business as usual, except that our videoconference system was in high demand for meetings throughout the day and on into darkness. For the first time ever, all of our outlying regions wanted to attend from the safety of their own areas, so we had to find a workaround. Our current system can support three simultaneous calls, and we needed five. Where to find a bridge?
In the educational sector, you develop contacts, and another school board put their (new, expensive) system at our disposal. We connected all of the meeting participants, and we even managed to pick up a stray broadcast from somewhere else (something else to Google).
