(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...We’re dependent on the “Intermittantnet”
If you’re wondering why there was a decrease in activity on the blogs today, it’s because our network connection was down. And then up. And then down again. E-mail was affected, as was almost all our other business processes. We were told it was a service provider issue. Isn’t it always. I’ll tell you one thing: out of all the disgruntled users that IT managers have to deal with, I’m glad they don’t have to deal with our writers and editors. We get downright grumpy.
The worst part was not that the network was down, but that it didn’t stay down. We would keep trying in vain to load a Web page or post something to the CMS, and suddenly for a few blessed moments it would be working. Then, in literally a minute or two, it would be down again. We started referring to this as the “Intermittantnet” and tried to adapt accordingly. It’s amazing how much you can try to squeeze into less than 120 seconds when you know that’s your only window.
The old saw in enterprise IT is that customers will not put up with downtime, which we all know is a crock — they put up with it all the time, but their employers would never let them tell us that. What’s worse than downtime, though, is quasi-downtime, when you’re just not sure whether to throw up your hands and walk away or stick around just a little longer. By the end of this day we’d been down so long it started to look like up to me.
