Design Challenges

What, Who, Say What?

Yesterday our power grid was overloaded and this cause all machines to go down for about half an hour until all servers were rebooted, firewall and exchange servers were restored, etc.

What was really disturbing is that working for a technology company, I was baffled that most people, especially those in sales, don't understand technology. How could someone be in the business of selling technology and not know the technology terms. Let me elaborate a bit to try and make it a bit more clear, when we told our staff that due to a small power surge the servers went down, they could not understand why the "internet" wasn't available, further, they didn't get that email wouldn't work either.

Once the servers were put back on the grid, we made an announcement that "the internet" was back on, but that the exchange server was still powering on so there would be a small delay in getting email to work. The office went into a rampage, they could not understand why the could access the net but not their email.

Baffling and confusing, but it was funny how work came to a halt eventhough most don't rely on the internet to perform their duties. It was pretty amussing to see a staff of 50 stop to whine about internet access for a good half hour.

Ahh, the era of technology! BTW- check out this article it was sent over to me by a co-worker, he writes a good technology blog over at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/ it reference a survey of technology lingo.