In one of the great ironies of the universe, I’m nominally responsible for maintaining both the public internet presence of my organization and as well as our intranet (read: electronic filing cabinet that pretends to be a website). And by responsible, I mean I have a contractor who tinkers with that stuff. At this afternoon’s staff meeting I learned that we have apparently clogged the internet (you know, that interconnected system of tubes that was invented by Al Gore sometime in the mid-1990s?). And by clogged, I mean jammed it full to the point of no longer working… Yep, we filled the bowl of our proverbial toilet with the entire roll of proverbial TP that is our internal document archive and then tried to flush. The result was, well, not quite an epic fail, but it was definitely in the fail family.

So apparently the secret to bringing our private little part of the internet to a grinding halt is to ask several hundred employees to upload their training certificates to our central file management system. Who knew? Some day it would be nice to go to the office and not have the internet groan to a stop under the weight of our impressive bureaucratic capability, or find a project that was running just fine at 3:30 the past afternoon coming unglued by 7:30 that morning, or the building burning to the ground… Well, technically the building hasn’t been on fire… I suppose it just seems that way.