Look, you all know I’m a big fan of the cloud computing concept, and I remain one, because the benefits do offset the difficulties. Usually. But this week, real clouds have really messed with my technological ones.

Because, for what is termed a fizzle of a storm compared to something like Katrina, Hurricane Irene has certainly left my native New England in, if not a physical mess, a technological one.

Four days with no electricity for a million or so people, as well as massive network outages teach us a little about how dependent we have become on our technology. We pick up our smartphones, our tablets, and our computers, and expect them to just work. Oh, we know that our email will be delayed, and we grimace at running out to the car to charge our phones, but its the little things we don’t think about. Like the fact that our project calendars are no longer synchronizing, meaning that whole teams, us, vendors and clients, become massively out of synch on the schedules and the work to be done.

Those of us who ARE able to work, also, may be working from outdated sets of plans, given that the architect (as they do) posted new ones in the middle of the night but they haven’t managed to leave his local server yet. Or the fact that our account keys, passwords, and encryption codes are no longer syncing between accounts, and if we are using automated systems they have forgotten how to recognize us. Or that we don’t know if we can proceed with work because we aren’t sure if customer transfers have actually cleared the bank. Or that the version of our bank account that our accounting system has is slightly out of sync with the bank, leading it to send messages that the balances don’t agree simply because a $1.00 fee hasn’t posted yet… or that my home security system, which uses a synchronized revolving token, won’t unlock for my car any more. Or that my “smart” TV has lost sync with my server and won’t recognize my content any more when it DOES come back up, at least without being reprogrammed. Or that my Exxon Mobil Speedpass cant work, because it hasn’t synched with my bank…

You get the picture.

If you are still online.

JRR