I decided to renew my driver's license today. But when my wife and I arrived at the Motor Vehicle Commission it was jammed. A very nice officer told us “the system is down, statewide.”
Statewide? In all 21 New Jersey counties? Sounds drastic. There were no obvious signs of any other power outages.
Options: wait it out or come back later. Seems like a simple enough choice. But the larger issue to me is once again our innocent dependence on electricity to run everything.
I didn't bother asking why “the system was down” or why the glitch affected every MVC station in New Jersey. They probably wouldn't know anyway. (The dog ate my PC?) (Mice in the infrastructure?) And apparently there were no manual backup systems to process all the people who wanted to register vehicles, renew licenses or conduct other motor vehicle type business.
As it happened we were meeting a friend for lunch in the vicinity. So while my wife chatted up the woman next to her I discussed where to meet for lunch. Just then the announcement was made that “the system is back up.”
So I got my new license and my GPS directed us to the restaurant where we met our friend and all worked out OK.
But you have to wonder. We're all so accepting these days that when “systems” go down they eventually will come back up.
What if they don't? Hmmmm.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment