Early adopters of new technology bear the brunt of system outages

This is not a complaint. Outages happen. Particularly in the wake of bad storms, outages happen. Eir puts its vans on the road after bad weather and tries to get everybody back online as soon as possible.

We’re sorry for their ongoing trouble, but the rest of us have a different problem when our server ceases to serve. It’s called withdrawal.

The worst thing about it was they couldn’t tell us. Because the server was down. Short of putting up a little plane with a message trailing behind it, they had no way to reach us, because we couldn’t get the radio on the internet or the TV or instant messages. If they put up a little plane the next time, I suggest the message should read: “It’s not you, it’s us, sorry, Eir.” Then we’ll be calmer. This time, when Eir got around to telling us what was wrong, they said it was a “domain name system outage”. Clear? No? Me, neither. Someone needs to tell Eir that being in a high-tech business doesn’t remove the human obligation — as a supplier — to be understood by customers who are not in hi-tech businesses. I just assume Eir collectively got hoose or mange or worms on Saturday and if they suffered the way we addicts suffered, that may have reduced their capacity to speak in English.