Thing #11: Blog about Technology

This one should be easy... get ready for a rant.

Last week was one of those times that bring out the latent Luddite in me. In the middle of the week, a tech from a company that we sometimes use for tech-support odd jobs that we don't want to do ourselves showed up to do a long-postponed replacement of a piece of equipment, something that should have been a simple matter. But Something Went Wrong, and our ILS was down for most of the next 24 hours, and we're still having some cleanup issues from that.

Just at the same time this problem developed, an apparently unrelated problem at the telephone company's end disrupted Internet access for one of our branches. Wouldn't have been a big deal except for the wasted time caused by the assumption that two problems occurring at the same time would also share causality.

And just as we were starting to get those two issues straightened out, another (apparently unrelated) problem developed with one of our servers that caused the database of customizations for our public catalog to be corrupted. Not a big deal, I run weekly backups of that - except that the last two months of backups have disappeared. Still not sure what happened there.

So last week was not good from a tech standpoint. Technology can be wonderful, and I'm normally an enthusiastic user of computers, but when things go wrong, and especially when multiple things go wrong at the same time, it can be a headache.

I don't remember now where I read this, but someone has said that computers are very good for solving problems we wouldn't have if we didn't have computers. There seems to be some truth to that.