irritating
One of the most irritating things to me is the expectation of six-nines service (e.g. 99.9999% uptime) from things which are free (or $1/mo). Haloscan, Blogger, LibraryThing, you name it. This is the internet—things happen. Also, people _sleep_ for chrissakes, or at least they sometimes try to. You can't have it both ways (free and always available) and you know what? Even if you
pay for something, you're not going to get six-nines service. You'll be lucky if you get two nines. Hell, you'll likely get a nine and an eight, or no guarantee at all. Or maybe a nine and a seven. Maybe a six.
My point is simply this: it is naive to think that everything is always on, even if you are. Blogger sucks because it went down for twenty minutes and I couldn't post about what I did today, or the world is going to end because for several hours no one could leave comments to my post, for the love of god who cares. Who cares? So we're inconvenienced because our blogging service burped. TypePad burps too. So does Yahoo. So does Amazon, and eBay, and every other entity online. Every single one. While we're inconvenienced, there are engineers running around trying to fix whatever the fuck got broken because every nine that drops off the counter means less income for their company and probably they'll be out of a job. The Blogger folks—and there aren't that many of them relative to the size of the company, as Google headcount != Blogger headcount—don't think they don't personally feel the weight of the entire internet on them when Blogger goes down unexpectedly for even a few minutes. It's one of the most fucking stressful feelings ever to watch your app crash to a halt and the collective hate of ten people, let alone 10 million people, focuses itself squarely between your eyes.
And Haloscan? Currently the recipient of the hate of 316,168 people? It's one guy.
One guy. He's not sitting back on some island somewhere thinking "ha ha, I took everyone's dollar and now no one can leave comments, teh suckers!" He's probably knee deep in some intermittant and/or indeterminable glitch, with pagers going off and angry emails piling up and realizing that every minute that goes by is one or ten less happy users and one or ten more exponentially compounding bits of bad Internet karma and if he's anything like me he'll want to say something like "everyone just leave me the fuck alone while I try to fix this problem I can't even consistently track down" NOT "screw you"...even though that's what everyone's saying to him. Or to Blogger. Or any other online entity that we have come to rely upon the last few years as some crucial part of our
selves. Go take a walk or something and come back later and the whole matrix will all be back in place and we can resume our whatever-insignificant-thing-we-all-blog-about blogging and commenting.
