Full Moon Traffic Congestion
Musing on Lawyers & One-Link Wonders
I got suspended on Substack. Must have been some buttercup who ratted on me. Eish. They don’t like eddy? I need to my my stories elsewhere and put my SD-WAN stuff back on LinkedIn.
eddy & I had a date with a moon ride at the Cradle this last Thursday of October. Full moon. Ray, surprising us, said he would come along. We checked our lights, pumped the wheels & headed out.
Then we hit Cedar Road & found ourselves in an almighty traffic jam. Caused by our cadres who still don’t repair the infrastructure. We were going nowhere fast. Broken traffic lights & boemelaars directing traffic badly. These cadres, stealing us blind in taxes and being self-righteous while buying fancy German cars instead of doing maintenance. Nee, bliksem. But many businesses are the same. Just look at their IT thats in the toilet.
As I sat there, engine idling, I thought about what I could do to escape it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Earlier that same day an IT company that had taken over one of my sites told me they were cancelling. They had already cancelled the second fibre link. They were now one-link wonders. Resilience? Not interested.
This is common among IT people in South Africa. Running risks with no mitigation plans. I see it often.
In the data centre there are two of everything. Sometimes three. Third-party engineers walk in and talk up a storm about redundancy & uptime. Then you visit their own offices & discover they have no resilience of their own. One fibre. One path. One-link wonders.
No plan for outages or brownouts. No last-mile management. Just a guy who genuinely believes IT doesn’t need two paths. One is fine.
eddy, we’ve discussed this before. The same chops who don’t carry spare tubes in their saddle bags. When things go pear-shaped they start throwing blame at everything except themselves.
We finally made it to Bidon. Ray bolted down the road. I followed at a more leisurely pace.
It was a rather uneventful ride after that. Just the setting sun & lonely roads.
eddy, I have a joke.
“Give it to me, Mastelek.”
Saddam Hussein, a lawyer & the devil knock on your door. You have a gun with two bullets. Who do you shoot?
eddy said, “You got me. I think maybe Saddam Hussein… and the lawyer?”
No. You shoot the lawyer. Then you shoot him again to make certain he is dead.
“Jislaaik, Mastelek. Didn’t think of that, but you’re right about lawyers.”
“But those IT guys acting as roadblocks are a close second.”
“Net so, eddy.”
We’re not going to solve that particular brand of thinking out here in the Cradle. But dammit, it just drives me nuts. We arrived back in the dark at Biden, loaded up and headed home. At home I found Arum on the bed, she looked at me with that cat face. That where were you? I’m ignoring you.
