rstrong's blog
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Ownership
April 29th, 2011 by rstrong
For around 6 years back in the late 80′s through the early 90′s I managed (my first stint as a manager) a telecom and datacom department for a site with 10 buildings and at its maximum 1500 employees. One of my pet peeves was not having a UPS for the telecom system since if there was ever a power outage people in buildings that didn’t have a security presence would be cutoff from the world. Every year I would present to corporate a request for a UPS and every year they would turn it down. About a year and a half before I quit I included a document that included the fact that if an earthquake happened (think Loma Prieta earthquake around that same time period) that caused a power outage then the people in the buildings without security would not be able to contact security much less any emergency services they might need. For example, we had highly corrosive acid in some of the buildings. I also stated that as a lowly manager there was no way I could take on the responsibility for this decision along with the ramifications noted in the document and included a place to sign the document for the corporate officers to acknowledge that they received and have read this document (I was friends with the company lawyer). I quit a short time later for greener pastures but still had friends at the company that informed me that they finally approved the UPS and they took credit for doing the “right thing”.
*edit* should have mentioned that this was before the proliferation of people having cell phones. As a matter of fact, I had one of those old “ammo case” portable cell phones.
It isn’t important to be given credit for doing the “right thing”… it is important to get the “right thing” done.
Note that even in a cell phone world, a major earthquake will likely shut down the mobile phone network too. And if not, only priority call will be allowed on it (i.e. only a few selected people will be able to use it).
Anyway a UPS is still a good thing to have.
On 9/11, not only the mobile phone network of NYC, but of most of the East Coast got completely saturated!