Purveyors of Pixels Since 2001.™

Lessons Learned Courtesy of Mother Nature

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006  |  Tom Carmony

The past five days have been rather harrowing for many of us here in the Pacific Northwest. The windstorms that swept through the region last Thursday night knocked out power to more than one million homes throughout Washington and Oregon. Aside from addressing the most basic issues such as maintaining food and shelter and avoiding the cold, Mother Nature also brought with her a test for businesses – dealing with the impact of the storm on technology, communication and more.

Here at my home office, from which the vast majority of all Bainbridge Studios work and communication emanates, the storm proved to be a particular test. Having been fortunate over the years, we’ve rarely been faced with any power outages lasting more than a couple minutes and Internet service outages have been few and far between (knock on wood).

Thankfully, we had pretty fair warning that this particular storm was coming and what could be expected as far as damage. By late Thursday afternoon, the winds and rain were significantly picking up and the lights began to flicker. Having finished up most of the day’s work, I went through a quick backup routine to get an additional set of all client/project files on a portal USB2 drive and then powered down the office server. Despite a few “blinks”, the power did in fact manage to stay on throughout most of Thursday evening, finally dropping off early Friday, around 1:15am.

Friday is what proved to be the true test of flexibility. We woke up to no power, no heat and (obviously) no Internet access. Given the seemingly slim prospects of the power being quickly restored that day, Dianne and I elected to head out of Seattle for the day, visiting with family in the burbs that were fortunate to have power.

Unfortunately, their DSL service was down.

What could have been a rather insane day of managing work, sans online access, turned out relatively painless. My Blackberry provided easy access to keep up on any/all incoming email and allowed me to inform clients of the day’s events and circumstances. That, paired with a relatively light work day (with only a couple minor deliverable deadlines to meet), made the potentially madding actually rather manageable.

I did find myself spending a good deal of Friday afternoon bouncing from cafe to cafe in search of a working WiFi connection to get a couple client email campaigns ready for delivery, but aside from that, managed to crank out a reasonably productive day in spite of the circumstances.

So what did I learn from last week’s experience? Planning is key. You never know when adverse circumstances (be it weather, accidents or any number of other factors completely out of your control) will impact your business, and it’s best to be prepared:

  • Have flexible options for working from the road.
  • Make sure your computer systems have working APC backup devices, to allow you to save files and properly shut down your computers in the event of a power outage (I discovered that my APCs didn’t hold up well when the power was lost).
  • Have an email- and web-enabled phone or PDA that will give you access to email and necessary online services, and make sure that device works when the power or WiFi is down.
  • Back up your data! Regardless of pending nature disasters, always maintain backup copies of your critical data. Ideally, that backup should be portable, so you can simply grab an external drive and take it with you.
  • Finally, and probably most important of all, RELAX. No matter how frustrated and stressed you might be in that crisis moment, there are others out there dealing with a lot more. If you’ve taken the necessary steps to prepare yourself and your business for such adverse circumstances, you’ll be fine. Relax and enjoy the adventure.
 
 

Filed Under » In-House, Small Business, Tech | Comments Off


Comments are closed.