A break in routine
A strange, retro day at the office. Any time I’m met at the door, there’s a chance that things won’t be smooth; today fit the pattern. Seems that we’d lost our Internet feed during the night.
Imagine, if you can, fifty-odd souls driven back to BI (Before Internet). A break in the fibre, somewhere. And with that, the whole focus changed. We depend, more than we want to admit, on connectivity. At the corporate level, our servers, our telephones, the all-important email. All affected. Note, I didn’t say “gone”. We still had partial phone service, partial email, partial access to the server farm. Just enough to escape closing for the day.
The tracing of the fault lay with others. Professionals. A service team dispatched before daylight from Montreal, with their truck and expensive test gear (a TDR, or Time Delay Reflectometer). Enough to isolate the break point to within a single office building, somewhere downtown. It wasn’t at our end. It wasn’t our expense. And within six hours things were back to normal.
Interim plan: reset the dial patterns for the VOIP, notify the supervisors and principals all the way down the line, try to calm the local (excited) population. And then accept that the easy answers were no longer available.
No Google. No program documents. No outside contact (email is the lifeblood). No news. Worse than vacation in a campground…
Tomorrow will be another ordinary day, I can feel it in my bones. Today was a reminder that we’re no longer as smart as we used to be.
