Sadly, this is a telecom mantra. I've never been a true fan of the actual concept, but the saying can elicit a few laughs.
But here's the thing..... We don't suck. Call me simple minded, but I am amazed at what my industry accomplishes every day. There is almost no other industry with more actual "moving parts". The ability to send an email or make a phone call still makes me feel a tad giddy. The ability to empower a large call center, or a data center, or a chain of locations operating with the singular mind of HQ.....utterly confounding.
So what's the comment here? People suck. I'm including myself here. I take for granted the things around me that I don't understand. I strive not to, but it happens.
Arthur C. Clarke said that any new technology appears as though magic (paraphrased). But it seems after a while we become jaded, take it for granted, and forget what it was that amazed us in the first place. We become demanding and myopic.
We operate with an unrealistic, uninformed, head in the sand, selfish approach.
So people suck. Because we have unrealistic expectations and lose sight of what once amazed us.
But here's the thing..... We don't suck. Call me simple minded, but I am amazed at what my industry accomplishes every day. There is almost no other industry with more actual "moving parts". The ability to send an email or make a phone call still makes me feel a tad giddy. The ability to empower a large call center, or a data center, or a chain of locations operating with the singular mind of HQ.....utterly confounding.
So what's the comment here? People suck. I'm including myself here. I take for granted the things around me that I don't understand. I strive not to, but it happens.
Arthur C. Clarke said that any new technology appears as though magic (paraphrased). But it seems after a while we become jaded, take it for granted, and forget what it was that amazed us in the first place. We become demanding and myopic.
We operate with an unrealistic, uninformed, head in the sand, selfish approach.
So people suck. Because we have unrealistic expectations and lose sight of what once amazed us.
Comments
Love the blog so far.
I couldn't agree more with this particular post. Although, I must confess that I have disparaged many a service provider across the country, but not yours. At least not in the past year.
Having said that, I too am amazed at how all of this stuff works. Just the thought of a simple phone call is enough to make one's head spin. The average phone call is sampled on each end at 8000 times a second. I can't even fathom that and it works time and time again. There are PBX's in companies that have been running solid for over a decade. There are circuits that have been up for years. Yes, it truly boggles the mind when you think about it. You could say the same thing about the aviation industry or even how gasoline gets to all of the individual gas stations.
These things work time and time again and yet we get bent out of shape when it is unavailable for an hour or even 5 minutes.
Unfortunately, not everybody gets excited about this stuff. They see a down circuit as lost revenue. They can't tolerate any outages and yet they rarely want to pay for redundancy. It is a no win situation. The airline industry can fly thousands upon thousands of flights with no problems, but crash one plane and you end up changing your name from ValueJet to AirTran. I suppose that's the way it goes.
I don't think most execs, CIO's, etc... care about how it works. Just that it works. Of course, they still need service providers. They still need hardware manufacturers. Maybe a mandatory subscription to Popular Mechanics would do everybody some good!