This morning I walked in slightly late for a meeting. I did not know which room I had to go to. I opened my Outlook and realized that I had lost EVERYTHING there! Everything. Mails. Calendar. To-do. Everything just disappeared.

My heart sank. I had no idea how to react. I did not know if it was something I did or if it was some virus.

After taking a deep breath, I started looking at the new emails that came in after I opened the mailbox. There it was - an email from Corporate Information Systems. They said that they had a major email failure and after several calls to Microsoft that yielded no result, they were going to restore everything from the backup. It is going to take the entire day to restore. But at least they guaranteed that no information will be lost. Let’s see how far that guarantee goes.

But it makes me think - we are at the mercy of technology, which of late has become quite undependable. Companies are allowee to put fine print in the terms of agreement whereby they are allowed to have such miserable failures and not be responsible. How is that allowed? Why is there no action taken by consumers and businesses (major customers of these companies) to ensure that someone is held accountable for major failures like these?

If I really lose these emails, I have no way of bringing them back. My personal backup was from a month ago. So all the correspondence of the last month is virtually lost. It is not frustrating only because of that loss, but more so because of the way Microsoft was allowed to live its life while my company frantically restores from backup.

Hmph!