Crisis

Working in I.T. these many years has exposed me to the "daily crisis". When you think of how business depends on computers these days, how company management understands so little about them, and how error-prone these systems can be, it's easy to see how things can get hot at times.

The concept of self-aware machines as envisioned in movies such as Terminator and 2001 Space Odyssey seems absurd to me, given how these things seem to always break at the wrong times. Millions of lines of human-crafted code, operator-error, electrical components, dependencies on air-conditioning and power supplies, unexpected volumes, unexpected data patterns, floods, networks, viruses, failing system-to-system interfaces, rushed or incomplete testing, and faulty third-party components are a few of the problems which could be encountered, sometimes in unpredictable combinations.

I've had issues in which we lost three years of accounting data, customer service systems simply stopped working in the middle of the day, a new release for 25000 employees was inoperable, and so on ... so many I can't remember them.

And that's the point ...

Over the years I learned that every crisis is eventually resolved if one remains calm, confident, and committed to the solution. I also learned that the crisis which so dominated life for a few days can barely be fetched from memory a year later. If remembered, it's sometimes with fondness: "remember that time we all worked three straight days ...".

That knowledge of past crisises faced and solved gives one the ability to deal with the next one.