Tuesday, November 16, 2010

I blinked...

Wow, I feel like a hostage must feel. Through administrative confusion, our corporate account at a certain web service got frozen out today. I'm not going to name the service provider, because then it might sound like I'm whining. I don't want to do that. So we'll just leave the details blurry, if that's all right with you.

So our company has been using this service for some time now, and it's been very effective at helping our dispersed team collaborate. The service has also accumulated a lot of our corporate knowledge in its logs and transcripts. When our account was frozen, we could no longer use the service, which is quite understandable... you don't pay, you can't play. What surprised me though is how there was absolutely no way to get back any of the data that the service had accumulated. At least, not without paying to thaw our account.

I always thought that you should just shoot the hostage taker, and live with the consequences. Negotiating with terrorists and all that. But when I was the one feeling the gun to my head, my perspective changed dramatically.

And I blinked.

I paid up the ransom, and now we have our data back.

But I swear, I'll never do that to any of my customers.