You Are Not in Control | Frankology 48

Yesterday one of my sites went down. While not the first time for me, and happily, a so far unimportant site, I am reminded of just how little in control of the system we are. By this I mean, we know who we are paying to store and or display our product, but that is about the end of the line for most of us.

Over the years I've been able to teach myself more than the average Joe about back-end hosting, data storage, and even data centres to a degree. I'm able to create reroutes, CNAME and A-records, upload files directly and a lot of other useful things. I'd go as far as to say, a support call with me is far less of a game of Marco Polo than with many others.

Of course, the support call remains a sore spot. First, it takes far too long to get someone on the line. Second, it takes far too long to explain the issue, partly because you are assumed an idiot and partly because many support centre call staff are bottom of their craft (they are very likely idiots too). When the game of “who's an idiot” is finally over, only then can we get down to the problem which is 100% of the time magically inexplicable and will require time to rectify.

The point here is this, while we believe we are in control of what we know, what we create and so own, we are very far from it. We are but one magical moment from total darkness. A sobering thought.