No Internet for just one day
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
In the morning of August 21, our Internet connection went down. We called the Internet Service Provider right away and they couldn’t come until 4pm in the afternoon. It was ok for them to come within the same day and it is the best service they can offer. So, we tried to work that day without Internet connection.
We found out that it was almost impossible to accomplish 50% of our work within the day. We have to physically pass CD-ROM or USB stick among our clients and CTP/film output companies. We cannot retrieve and answer queries from our clients. We even utilized our staff’s 3G phones to check emails and files on our servers, but it wasn’t enough. Since we couldn’t communicate with our clients effectively, some mistakes were made and needed extra time to communicate more and fix.
By the time it was 4pm, the ISP’s service people came and identified that the Internet modem was dead. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a spare one with him. He placed an order for us immediately but a new one would be delivered the next day’s afternoon. We were almost panic because we knew that we couldn’t survive for another day without Internet connection.
Out of extreme frustration, one of our staffs took the modem apart and found 2 blown capacitors.
He yanked out those 2 capacitors from another device and replaced the two on the modem. Then miracle happened and the modem worked again. We all cheered in tears and joy because we could really work again. By the time it was 5:30pm and it took us 2 more hours to finish the day’s work. However, more work was accomplished within those 2 hours when comparing to the whole day earlier.
We now realize that we can’t underestimate the importance of Internet connection. The importance is almost comparable to phone line to many businesses. Most clients are passing information and working files through Internet nowadays. We are basically back to “stone age” without Internet. If resource is available, a backup plan on Internet connection is strongly recommended.