I work off of servers constantly at work. I admit I take it for granted, but I do keep everything I do on my hard drive because you never know what could happen to the servers.

Back in January, the servers crashed. There had been no backups for approximately nine days. This isn’t good. Luckily my graphics department usually keeps everything that we do on our computers, so we were able to salvage our work. The editors were so thankful that we still had everything on our hard drive. However, this meant the graphics department couldn’t do anything during the time the servers were down. We had nothing to do for an entire week. (Thousands of dollars wasted on dawdling around at work.)

It took more than a week before anything got done. But the hours of down time bored me to tears. There wasn’t much for us to do except wait until the IT guy rebuilt our RAID backup. Not that I have any idea what that means (Let’s just say whenever he emails us to inform us of problems with the servers, etc, he blows a lot of fluff up our a**.)

The scary thing that he told us was that, from June 2005 to December 19, 2005, the backup was not working properly. Now, if everything had crashed any time between those dates, we would’ve been ROYALLY screwed. To this day, I still wonder how he hasn’t gotten any probations or warnings. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good guy. But if the servers had crashed, and he hadn’t done anything between June to December to assure our work would be perfectly fine, I would think there should be consequences.

Anyway after a week of having nothing to do at work, we finally got our servers back up and were able to resume work once again.

Now, it’s May and I show up to work on Friday morning only to find that the same thing has happened again. Luckily the back up was through Wednesday night at 11 pm. So nothing too significant had been lost. However, we still weren’t able to do anything….it’s now Monday morning, and we’re all awaiting the okay before we can start getting files we need off the servers.

This is a problem. It costs my company thousands of dollars every hour because no work is being done.

I wonder what would happen if this happened at a hospital, or a military base. Or even Social Security offices. Identities could be lost. Important information could be revealed to the wrong people. I think sometimes we might take technology for granted. I admit I take technology for granted, and it frustrates me when I can’t access my computer, or my phone’s not working properly, or my iPod has crashed and I have to upload thousands of songs all over again. My entire life is on my computer. I wouldn’t know what to do without it.

Could you live without your computer, your phone/pagers, your iPod?

Since I’m going to Paris for 4 days this Wednesday, I’m going to try to live without my computer and my phone. My iPod…I refuse to live without music. but other than that, I think I’ll deal just fine. But only just four days, because if it was any longer, I’d probably lose all patience from not being able to talk to my friends on a daily basis.