CSotD: Downtime looks like up to me
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When I read that Facebook had gone down last week, I thought, "Maybe some places, but not here." I thought maybe it had been accidentally been blocked on some influential browser or something. There was certainly no interruption of service that I had noticed.
Then I realized when it went down, which just happened to be a heavy deadline day for me. It could have been off a good deal longer than it was, and I wouldn't have noticed.
But this John Cole cartoon made me think of my last office job, when I was editor of a small paper at which nobody on the staff was quite as old as my youngest child. I didn't mind them taking the occasional personal phone call or checking their email. After all, I was used to working in places where there were always a good number of people whose productivity went into a trough between 2:30 and 3:15, when they would be on the phone dealing with afterschool issues.
But, while they never offered to let their children wander off untended, those distracted parents were somewhat apologetic over having to deal with it each day. Facebook is different. Not only are people not apologetic about it, but my reporters felt no scruple over going off on some interview and leaving Facebook open on their desktops. Discretion, people, please! Those old newspapermen of legend at least kept the bottle of bourbon nominally hidden in a desk drawer.
At one of the dailies where I worked, the real culprits were in the circulation department. They'd have a lot of calls from about six in the morning until just before noon, because, with over 30,000 subscribers, it was inevitable that you'd have some "skips" to make good. But then things would slow down and, while someone in the bullpen was always on the phone solving some problem or other, there would be long periods of not much customer service to service.
Some of the obvious megatimewasters like Ebay were blocked, but you couldn't block everything and expect the people who actually needed connectivity to be productive. As a result, the folks in circulation had amazing screensavers and were always up on the latest lolcats and other Internet jokes and memes. And according to the guy in charge of IT, they were also the source of about 80 percent of the spam, spyware, adware and general trash infecting our system and making it crawl.
Though in fairness, it should be noted that the one time a genuine virus hit our system and brought us to our knees, it originated at corporate HQ.
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