Yesterday, the server was down. I briefly contemplated hurling myself off the Lions Gate Bridge. I knew that when the paramedics were called, someone would say, “What’s going on?” and someone else would say, “She got one too many Error 404 messages,” and the other guy would just nod his head knowingly, “Ah, the 404…”

Our head geek told us that he’d never seen a database quite so corrupted.  Our database is smoking and listening to Marilyn Manson?! How did THAT happen? What kind of other databases has it been hanging around?

As you may or may not know, I am not naturally technical. But I have learned many things through trial and error. I actually know what HTML is, and (gasp) have a vague notion of what <div id=”floatclear”> </div> means. I’m lying. I don’t really know what that means, just that it seems to be fairly critical, and punctuation is waaaay more important than your English teacher said.

I’ve seen people freak out before, yelling THE SERVER IS DOWN! and thought, “Well, then pick it up, dust it off, and start over! Sheesh, what’s WRONG with these people?”. But apparently, it’s not that simple. Index files need to be deleted then regenerated, master files restored, backups made and the army called in. It’s no small thing.

Yesterday, on our own private state of emergency, we all realized how much we rely on brilliant programmers to make things run smoothly. And like everything, you never really notice how well things work until they don’t. Programmers: I bow to you. You control the universe. You know that, right? Because, heck, if you can read this – somebody did their job right!