Chapter 17. Things That Go Bump in the Night (and How to Sleep Through Them)
SEVEN YEARS AGO, YAHOO! HIRED ME to co-develop a Business Continuity Planning program. With my set-top-box programming background and supercomputer-video-server parenting experience, I was well prepared to immediately step in and say, "Um, what the heck is BCP?" It sounded so formal and businesslike; where was the technology vector here? I was more than a little concerned about the job I had just accepted, until I suddenly realized: "Wait, we have how many hundreds of millions of customers???" (My previous company had all of three clients.) I thought about all of the websites I use every day and wondered what life would be like without them. At that point, though still fairly early in the life of the Web, I was no longer capable of living a normal life without it. Something as simple as checking out a new restaurant downtown would be impossible without an online map product. I communicated with friends and family mainly through email and instant messaging; I didn't even have many of their phone numbers anymore. All of my financial planning and stock price ogling was done online. If the Web went down, my daily life patterns would be in disarray. Multiply this pain by a few hundred million, and I suddenly understood the meaning and importance of my new job. I had to keep the Web running, or at least my part of it.
One fine morning, soon after I started, a friend and coworker of mine got paged ...
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