Edit: The link below is to one of my older articles. It still feels like yesterday.
Originally posted March 6, 2012 on AIXchange
This anecdote from author Neil Gaiman got me thinking:
“I left my Macbook Air on a plane on Sunday night, and have spent most of the rest of the week doing things like being on the phone to the backup service, learning that the tracking software I’d thought was on there was on there, but hadn’t been activated, buying a new computer, etc. I didn’t get the thing I was meant to be writing written. I was grumpy.
“And this morning I got an e-mail telling me that the thing that I would have been working on all week, that I’d already lost 15 pages of … was now going to change so radically I would have wasted a week’s work if I’d been working on it. So I am happy.”
I view this story on a few levels. Do you have a backup of your phone and laptop if you should lose both right now? If you’ve installed tracking software, have you tested it? Are you comfortable knowing that all someone has to do is wipe your machine and your tracking software will be useless? And were that to happen, would you still have your contacts, your latest projects, the data that is critical to you? Or would they be lost forever?
On a larger scale, if your data center burned down, can you restore it? Do you have disaster/recovery procedures in place? Have you tested them?
But beyond the loss of the Gaiman’s machine and his data, I was also struck that he had a deadline, he had something that needed to be worked on and completed, and he had lost some of that work. Fiddling with his computer rebuild had caused him to lose time that he could have spent working on the project. As things turned out though, his requirements changed and any work he would have done would have been wasted.
I’ve heard that some people are purposefully nonresponsive. When they get a call, e-mail or instant message, they’ll wait instead of answering immediately. Then, by the time they do respond, the person making the inquiry may have solved the problem without any assistance. While I don’t think IT folks should ignore their users, it is true that many times people will reach out rather than take a moment to examine their issue a little further. And, once they dig into the problem, they can often help themselves.
Of course, in our world, projects seldom change, and time spent fighting our machines is simply time lost. At least in this case, it’s nice to think that the universe was looking out for this author and things worked out in the end for him. Hopefully the universe looks out for all of us on occasion.