Downtime Day 0

It is Thursday morning and you turn on the machine that is amanuensis and secretary, in altogether too many senses of these words. And... there is a terrible lack of response.

This then is Downtime Day 0, D-Day, the day dedicated to the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, who comes upon you riding a blue horse, with the vagaries of electromagnetic chaos in his hand. This is not what you were brought up to believe, but is what you have learnt while walking the narrow corridors of invisible light.

And thus has D-Day come, and the last trump has sounded for your trusty hard disk drive of a decade's faithfulness. For at the heart of every HDD is MTBF — the buried seed of betrayal that always sweeps away the faithful history of duty. MTBF — Mean Time Between Failures. MTBF, which stands for many other things best not said here.

This is D-Day, and where Hell is, there we must ever be, Faustian in all our downfall, lost without our digital dominion. Or so the playwrights would have it.

Yet this is not altogether true:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

I decide to take the day off. I will remember — these days were made for man, not man for such days. And I will be at peace.