Wednesday, when the Internet went down as a result of damage to a “fatpipe” in Vermont, that gave me some pause and some chills here at the offices of this paper.
I thought that the Internet had finally collapsed under the weight of all the FarmVille bumper crops, free streaming porn, pictures of the Kardashian family, and all those cats.
It was an odd few hours. Stories were half-written, somewhere in that ubiquitous “cloud” online that was as unreachable as a real one. the phone system went down. Attempts to wi-fi the computers together were sort of like tying two strands of jello together. Work came to a complete and utter halt.
The worst part was, I didn’t have a deck of cards in my journo-bag to relieve other members of the office out of their surplus funds. the big bag had a lot of stuff in it, (laptop, charger, camera, digital audio recorder, snacks, lint, notebooks, and the Beatles white album) but no cards.
There was even talk of having to do a late night-run to North Conway to manually drop off a digital copy of the paper at the printing facility. Thankfully, it never came to that. I’m not sure anybody who works at the office could have withstood the heart palpitations of such a frenzied journey, at least with my driving.
But in the modern “everything bundled together” office, we were well and completely screwed. Two of the reporters’ cell phones worked fine as phones, but were pocket bricks as far as Internet access goes.
There has got to be a better way. Anything from satellite broadband to wi-fi plug-in modems. This is the kind of thing FEMA talks about. Sure, it’s a great idea to have that emergency storm bag ready to go, and a plan. but what do you do if you and the rest of the family actually have to break down and talk to each other?
About ten years back, a satellite burned out, and whole swaths of the U.S. were without ATM access for about four days.
Interesting when you consider the long (and falsely) quoted bit of conventional wisdom, that the Internet was designed to “withstand a nuclear attack.” It was taken out by a flooded river. First the primary line went down, then the backup. Redundancy plans became thick books of documented failure. A local radio show host was considering what a “nightmare” his morning show was going to be, without the ability to drop in weather and news updates. National news stories took a backseat.
One person here at the office had a different take. She lost her ability to work from home OR at the office, but looked at it a different way. “If the net is down, you just have to realize that it is OK to stop. It’s OK to go get a cup of tea.”
Not to be taken aback by this, I started thinking about bringing in a server from home, and having it pre-loaded with a bunch of the applications we use here daily at the paper. Swap a few wires around on the router, and the whole thing works as an internal network. Stuff can still get done.
If the modern day hipsters (hippies 2.0?) at Burning Man can set up wireless networks and a cell phone system in the middle of the desert, and have it work for the weekend festival, we should be able to do something like that here in Portland.
No, I don’t fear “the Guv’mint” shutting down the net, but look at the “Arab Spring” stuff as sort of a warning shot. Networks fail, or can be brought down on a whim. Disasters kill phone systems as well as the only bridge out of town. when things get bad enough, even those Ramen soup packages begin to look edible.
So what is your disaster plan? Could your office get back to work on a Monday? Would folks be sitting around, whiling away the hours playing solitaire and waiting for the phone system to come back online? will the copier work if the router is fried? who do you call if the vending machine runs out of tasty snacks?
All questions that an Internet outage, albeit a brief one, bring to mind.
More important than all of this is finding enough space in the bag for the deck of cards. the net might be down for hours or days, and the most important lesson to learn is that the sheep still need to be shaved.
(Bob Higgins is a regular contributor to the Portland Daily Sun. when the Internet is working, you can contact him at typingmonkey1@gmail.c0m.)
