Someone should write a book about this!
Woke up this morning to find the Internet down. Not just the broadband at home, but all of our phones as well. Optus had fallen over. I shrugged it off at first, thinking, well, at least I won't be tempted to waste time on Facebook. I'll be able to get an early start at work. And I was, except, of course, that I couldn't access any of the online tools I normally use.
It was a pretty quick lesson in just how totally dependent I’ve become on streamed services. Even my favourite dictionary (Onelook.com) is online. No probs, I told myself. I’ll just consult my trusty…
My trusty…
What’s the word I’m looking for?
I don’t know because I couldn’t find the hardcover edition of the Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus that sat on my desk, gathering dust for so many years. It's hard to believe, but I must've got rid of them at some point. I never do that. I never throw away anything. But apparently, I threw away two of the most useful books I have ever owned.
Dictation services were also down, except for Siri within Apple's Pages. That one must be available on device, but it's nowhere near as accurate as the Dragon-based software that Microsoft folded into Word. Software you need a live connection to run.
I kept reaching for my phone or clicking into Safari on the Mac, thinking I’d do a quick search of the news to see if it was a big outage or just me. But of course, I couldn’t. No internet. Even our landline was gone, ditched years ago in favour of mobiles.
It made me think that when the Chinese do decide to grab up Taiwan and all those TSMC fabs, we’ll know because we won’t know. Everything will just go dark.
In the meantime I should probably buy a battery-powered radio and a dictionary/thesaurus.
It was certainly remarkable, and you know with all the concerns from ministers, senior executives, directors all demanding updates and 'when will it be restored' the actual 2 techs who have been around long enough to know where the code was patched last to actually try and fix it were saying "this would probably resolve faster if I could spend the time doing it and not having to update 8 different directors every 15 minutes". Also anyone want to guess if the cause is ever determined that there was a document filed by a dissatisfied tech probably in the last 18 months who has been desperately trying to make management aware that there was a critical point which could fail catastrophically unless we invest the time and resources, they final gave up a left when it was pencilled into the 2029/2030 budget estimates.
I just finished zero day code today. The timing of that was rather serendipitous and very funny at the same time.