It’s great fun watching the IT department during a network outage.  Suddenly all these people normally holed up in their offices start to poke their heads timidly out into the hallway, and then begin to roam the halls in uncertain groups, as if exploring their environment for the first time.

It makes it easy to separate the whole of IT into its component groups.  The network engineers aren’t anywhere in sight – they’re busily at work troubleshooting the outage.  The support staff are also working frantically to answer calls from users who are convinced it’s just their office that’s been cut off.  The systems programmers have less to do, but can still talk amongst themselves about what systems might be affected, and what possible contributions they could make toward solving the problem.

And then there are the application developers.  We just gather in a group, as if surrounding a campfire, acknowledge that we cannot perform any useful function at the moment, and tell stories of outages gone by.

(My favorite story was from a couple years ago when we had a power outage.  The machine room was well protected, but our desktop PCs switched off like lights.  As did the lights.  Just as an ominous silence blanketed the building, it was instantly cut off by the brief but loud swearing from an unknown person down the hall who had clearly not hit the Save button in a little while.)