New Technologies

A magazine is running a competition. Competitors should write an article entitled, "The day I was without technology". Recently, you had a bad technology day and nothing worked. Write your article and say how you managed to cope and whether your learnt anything from the experiences. Write between 280 and 320 words.

THE DAY I WAS WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY

That day had begun as always, not one could foresee the imminent disaster. We had been working for two hours when suddenly, at 10 am, just at the right moment when I was going to make a backup of the work I was been typing, the whole informatic system collapsed. I asked my mates and they confirmed me the worse: it was a general failure! Informatics added that solving the blackout would take some minutes. Then we realized that all our programs were connected and installed on the server, so we couldn't work at all. Consequently, we made the decision to have our breakfast earlier. After a recomforting meal, longer than usual, and with our hopes up, we came back to our posts but the problem persisted.

What could I do? I started tiding up some papers and files in my desk and shelves, but the troubles continued existing. Eventually, I shut the door, and I flicked through an engineering book, trying to have the most of such a strange day. Minutes were ticking by, but everything wasn't fixed yet. My mates were just chattering loudly in the corridor, so I decided to visit the construction sites outside. I came there and I met the foreman, surprised because any meeting had been scheduled, and we agreed the planning for the following days. When I had finished, I made a phone call to a colleague, who cheered up that everything had already been solved.

When I was driving back to the office, I thought about the vulnerability of our work procedures, where a single informatic problem might parallyse the whole day tasks. Sometimes we feel very proud about the increasement of productivity because informatic tools, but as we see in that weird day you cannot consider all of them being advantages.

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