A Single Point of Convergence

In my professional life I spend a lot of time trying to eliminate single points of failure in the systems and solutions my team and I build. We make sure all of our hardware can scale up as well as out, we make sure we have appropriate load balancing across all of this scaled out hardware and that our communication paths are redundant and diverse as well as many other efforts to make sure our systems and solutions don't fail.

So given all of this why do technologist such as myself continue to look for the perfect tool to carry around that converges all of the functions we need into one single point of failure, sorry meant one single device? Well because they are so nice to have, failure wouldn't happen to me, would it?

I had a Blackberry 8830 device that kept me in touch via email, voice, text. Gave me access to the web and had a myriad of applications such as VPN, Twitter and Yammer. It also had some nice utilities such as an alarm clock that I used when I travel (which is a lot).

Why bother messing with wake-up calls and hotel room alarm clocks, I had my own device that I knew all of the tricks to and it had worked for me for years ... till one night.

It was a late night when I finally got to bed after dutifully setting my "trusty" Blackberry for an early morning wake-up and drifted off to sleep.

I woke the next morning when sunlight started streaming through the hotel curtains, not the sort of thing I was expecting given my need for another early morning start of the day. Reaching for my Blackberry, I was greeted with the dreaded message ... push here to reset.

While the obvious thing to do was to actually push the button to reset, I know if was fruitless (but did it anyway). Once that message shows up on a Blackberry it has just become an expensive piece of useless plastic.

I scrambled to make my morning meetings and managed to just barely make it. I then had to make it through the day (a travel day at that) with no phone, no connectivity, no VPN. I still had my PC with me so all was not lost (this is a lesson post not a horror story), but getting through the day was tough. Worse yet, I had only one business day between the end of this trip and my next business trip so I had to act quickly to get reconnected. I even had to use a pay phone, yes they still exist :) to call my ride when I landed at home.

The good news is I survived, my excellent IT department loaned me a temporary Blackberry and had it delivered to my house on Saturday and I was good to go for my Monday business trip.

With time to think, I scanned all of my options to replace my Blackberry 8830 and chose the Blackberry Bold. This is a great device with all of the features and functions that my 8830 had plus lots more including a decent camera and the ability to run my favorite music app Pandora. With all of these new features I no longer needed my little Sony camera or for that matter my iPod (except for the silly issue with connectivity on an airplane).

Out of the failure of my old Blackberry had come more convergence and this was good! Of course learning important lessons is also good so now when I dutifully set my Blackberry's alarm, I also use the hotel's wake up service because making sure I wake up on-time on the road is just as important as all the convergence in the world.