Re: each drunken idiot's immediate head
As part of a pre-Y2K exercise I did a bit of work with a worldwide outfit doing remote management of relatively simple onsite equipment with no onsite support (what would later become known as M2M comms; back in those days it was being done over dialup, RF modem, and X.25, ie well before the days of broadband and IP, never mind IoT).
By 1998, maybe earlier, their installed networking kit and associated software and newtorking had already been investigated and the architects and engineers were convinced hat even though it was a bit long in the tooth it would be OK.
Some of the older kit didn't have pieces of paper from the vendors to satisfy the supplier's purchasing and legal teams, but the techies had considered that, and decided it was a more acceptable risk than ripping it out and redesigning.
Then with maybe a year or less to go, the legal+commercial folks decided anything that didn't have a vendor piece of paper saying "trust me, it'll be fine" was to be replaced, ASAP. This M2M network was one of the victims.
The paper pushers would rather something known to work, something that had been working for years, was ripped out and replaced in the space of 6 months by something that hadn't even been specified (let alone architected, written and purchased and tested and rolled out globally).
That was when I started thinking that it might be a good idea to have my own arrangements for backup electricity supplies at home, just in case. It looked to me and others that in the event of an ordinary routine failure in some important systems e.g. utility supplies, in a period of maybe 24 hours either side of the big day, the boardroom paperpushers would be calling in the lawyers and blaming it on Y2K, rather than following the usual route of getting the C+I/SCADA (or whatever) people to do their usual magick.
Times have changed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
