Email and Airplanes Down

Outlook at work stopped working shortly after arriving for my shift yesterday. I made a call to IT to ask if it was a network issue or if it was just me. The tech who answered me already sounded slightly annoyed which told me that it wasn’t just me. In fact, it wasn’t just everyone at work. It was everyone. It turns out that it was a Microsoft issue and it was a global outage. 

I depend heavily on emails at work as I am constantly communicating with other departments and even outside the company. It killed much of my workflow and I had to shift to what I consider “busy work.” I did, however, look to the old days before emails and created inter-office memos. My sense of humor even changed the font, so they looked like they came from a typewriter. I learned this morning that some of the recipients found it humorous as well. Sometimes you must look to the past for solutions in the present.

The outage ended at work a few hours before I arrived for my shift today. I didn’t get a flood of emails like I feared. I guess people just checked out when they couldn’t send out emails either. 

Then later in the day, I saw a new story pop up on phone saying that there was a nation-wide ground stop on airlines. I’m not familiar with specifics of what caused the stop. There isn’t any connection between the email outage and what happened with the airlines but I’m not sure I’d believe what the DOT would say anyways. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but it makes me wonder… 

My sister texted me to tell me that her husband is caught up in the situation over in North Carolina. I texted my brother-in-law and asked how he was doing. It turns out that he was only minutes away from boarding his flight when this debacle happened. He said car rentals are already out. I recommended that he get a U-Haul and gather a group together and split the cost. I mean it worked in Home Alone.