Published on 12, July, 2020
Was anyone effected by yesterdays tech outages?
I wasn't, but it did make me think, what would happen, or rather will happen, when another occurs? How will particularly younger people cope, with having to write things down with pen and paper, will they know how to do simple maths in their heads? How many people can read a map? How will people cope not being able to use things like ubereats?
It could get worse too, what if we can't get petrol because the pumps all run the same software, the banks, health services, shops who no longer have manual ordering. How would peple cope with being bounced back to the 1970's?
I heard about it when watching the news, but thankfully wasn't affected by it. My son visited our local shop yesterday on my behalf, and had no difficulty paying with my debit card. Admittedly, this was during the evening.
The tech outage brings back memories of an incident that happened when I worked at a petrol station just over 30 years ago. Nobody had thought to tell me that there was a mains switch under the counter. During one of my shifts, my knee had inadvertently brushed against the switch. After a frantic phone call to the manager, it was a matter of muddling through as best as I could until he arrived an hour or so later.
Until the power was turned back on, the petrol pumps and car wash were out of action, resulting in me taping a notice to the window advising that they were out of use. Fortunately, thanks to there being a manual drawer-release button on the till, I was at least able to continue serving customers who didn't need petrol, or want to use the car wash.
I was thankful to have grown up in an era that was less reliant on technology and accustomed to working things out on paper. It was the one thing than prevented a Hellish situation from getting any worse.