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It looked something like this. We had three fiber pipes, two of them added at our expense by the telcos. That's what it takes to get that kind of
performance and reliability in a small city in Arkansas. We had five nines uptime, in reality it was no downtime because there was total redundancy
and when the home base was completely down (for maintenance of a major disaster) and because we outsourced nothing important. In fact we outsourced
only things we could not do and were not mission-critical. But enough of that.
As I write this I am sitting at a computer using
Vim to edit a web page from scratch, composing as I go. Would you believe
that I had an anoxic encephalopathy a little over two years ago? Neither do I, but someone decided I did, and consigned me to a hellhole masquerading as a hospital to finish me
off. Someone employed by the Medical Industry, someone who makes a lot of money, and is probably going on with his/her life without a thought for the little person they discarded
so casually. By the way, it took me about ten minutes to make that image.
I designed and built the data center at our home office, purchased the equipment, managed it with the help of only one assistant. I could build racks and fill them with servers and the
other required equipment such as routers and firewalls. I could configure Cisco routers for a complex network, manage the firewalls and monitor security so that, in addition to
no downtime we never had a security breach in nearly twenty years.
I could go back and do it today, arguably better than the three or four people that replaced me. But two years ago I couldn't have, due to incompetence on the part of people whose work
is literally a matter of life and death for those relying on them. Incompetence that would have gotten me fired, but if you can hide your incompetence - with the complicity of your
employer - you go on your merry way destroying the lives of people who trusted you. And enjoying a very good life of your own, given your compensation.
My experience is by no means unique or even unusual. You don't have to be paying much attention to see the regular news of doctors exposed for malpractice and fraud, and there are a lot
of doctors in prison for deliberate systematic fraud, often over a long period of time before they are exposed and held accountable.
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