BSOD of a different kind

BSOD- abbreviation of ?‘Blue Screen Of Death’, was the flavour of the day on July 19th, 2024. I am pretty sure that BSOD will be a strong contender for ‘2024 Word of the year’ award when this year comes to a close. Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere, you would know that a faulty update from the security software company CrowdStrike incapacitated almost all computers running Microsoft Windows globally with the affected computers displaying the dreaded BSOD for hours, not allowing users to use their machines. In fact, this event has been termed as the largest outage in the history of computers. In contrast, the Y2K event - expected to be the largest outage when the world crossed from 1999 to 2000 - was not even a whimper.

Airports, stock markets, banks, websites got affected and so were offices employing service sector folks like me where laptops tend to be a natural extension of our fingers throughout ?a typical work day. With laptops crashing, most employers were single-mindedly worried about productivity loss, but reactions of most employees were interesting. Some jokes were cracked but the day was mainly full of complaints about IT (why can’t IT do something) ?/ technology companies (they can’t hold us to ransom like this) / life (I had urgent deliverables, life really sucks). There were also endless comments about ‘I have nothing to do / I can’t do anything without my laptop’.

This got me thinking (well, I anyways had spare time given BSOD).

Yesterday’s BSOD was certainly a freak incident, especially since it happened at such a large scale. But there is another BSOD at play with most of us and that too, all the time. Unfortunately, we are blindsided towards it. I would call it is ‘Busyness and Sulkiness Over Dose’. Let me explain. In today’s fast-paced world, we are used to being busy all the time. To top it, we are also used to having everything our way. Losing access to the laptop for a few hours takes away our sense of busyness and makes us sulky in an instant. We forget that we could still be productive without the laptop as an appendage.

So, how did I overcome both these BSODs yesterday. I relished a coffee. I called a couple of Clients I hadn’t spoken to for a long time. I walked around the office catching up with colleagues. Then, I sat down to dive into a couple of thinking tasks I was putting off for some time. In fact, yesterday was one of the most productive & creative days for me.

I feel better equipped now to take on BSOD in future.

How about you?