Yesterday, I was a witness and participant in chaos and pandemonium.
Seriously, have you ever wondered what would happen if you cut the power to a building full of IT people?
O.K. Well, for the first five minutes, you get the same “Oh, [insert favorite explicatives here]!” that any computer-using group of people would exclaim as they lost all of their unsaved work from the morning. Then, you probably have another five minutes of folks getting up and wandering from cubicle to cubicle querying each other if they also suffered a power loss, even though it’s a cube-farm and just by standing up you can tell it’s pitch dark from one end of the building to the other — O.K. the back of the office is darker because they have no windows at all; at least the front end has those pitiful street-level dusty windows with the hazy sunlight creeping in from around that building across the small parking lot that no one’s allowed to park in. Even the doors don’t work correctly because they are on electric locks that open to badge scanners. Heck, you can’t even go to the bathroom without scanning your badge, not that you want to since it’s now pitch dark back there — which means that many people suddenly realize they need to make use of the restrooms.
Then there’s a short period where everyone mills about talking about various shared projects, asking questions they’ve been storing up for when they ran into each other at the coffee pot or in the hall on the way to the bathroom. Then slowly even that winds down and people begin to get antsy. A few people will complain that they could be using this time at least to catch up on some reading but it’s all on their computers. Others realize that they can’t even waste the time waiting for the power to be restored by playing on the Internet. Several people decide that if the power isn’t back by 1:30, they are going to go home so they can dial in from home to get their work done.
Anxiety, chaos, pandemonium, uselessness…a whole IT department turned to zombies seeking a working electrical circuit so they can reconnect and feel whole and useful again. The horror.
I was forced to resort to cleaning off my desk to keep busy. It was a very long hour.
{ 1 comment }
hard to kill an hour WITHOUT my pc
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