A BlackBerry, an iPhone, a Droid.
A smoke signal, a carrier pigeon, and a good, old-fashioned land line.
There are times that I would opt for the way things used to be in a nano second. Last week was one of those weeks. We were hit with a major technology disaster and in the words of the owner of our outsourced IT firm, “this is simply the worst hardware failure I have seen in twenty years. This I have never seen. This is like the 100-year flood – the one you don’t really plan for. We plan by having spare firewalls, spare hubs, spare servers, spare hard drives, documentation, MS Support, and backups – but never have I seen catastrophic failure of hard drives like this.”
For a small business, we invest in the tools and technology necessary for our team members to have the ability to work 24x7, should a client need arise. For good or bad, our agency has evolved into a state where we sleep next to our smartphones, Tweet from events, manage a crisis from a soccer field and respond to emails at a rapid pace before leaving the next parking lot. We aren’t unlike many other creative agencies. As a team, we rely heavily on email, cell phones, SharePoint and our disgruntled server, appropriately named “LaMonna”. When it all failed, we quickly remembered that technology is both a blessing and a curse.
While I wouldn’t wish this exercise upon any small business, we did learn a few valuable lessons. When it all goes quiet on the technology front, it's amazing the space it creates for the rest of the world to keep moving.