In business the name of the game is efficiency. That is why so many of our daily tasks have migrated to the Internet. If people have access to their work no matter where they go there’s less need for personal days and they can work wherever they want without having to be in the office. Most of the time this is a great thing. It gives workers more freedom and flexibility and it gives companies greater productivity. But what happens when there is an internet outage? Major outages are more common than you might imagine, and they can be caused by some pretty silly things. Just last fall a veritable army of IoT home appliances such as crock pots and cameras had a major vulnerability exploited which resulted in a nationwide shutdown of several popular sites such as Twitter and Netflix. So what do you do when the Internet goes out and no one in your office has the ability to get work done? You take an Internet Snow Day.
Remember when you were a kid and snow days were basically the best days ever? You could sleep in and watch TV all day and finally do that homework you have been putting off. It’s a little different when you work in an office. For starters, snow days mean that you work from home because the Internet is still up and running. But when the Internet goes down you get to experience the adult equivalent of a snow day. It’s time to have a little fun and unplug!
So maybe you can’t browse Pinterest for recipes, but you can drag out your grandmother’s cookbook collection and find something new to cook. And you can’t listen to streaming music while you are cooking but you can listen to CDs or records. The sound quality is much better than streaming music anyway, and chances are you had no idea because it has been such a long time since you listened to your record collection anyway. While your dinner is in the oven you can’t download a new book to your e-reader, so maybe you will just have to get one of those books off the shelf that have been collecting dust and read it.
There’s still a lot you can do when the Internet is out, and it’s OK to take a day to rejoin the living and enjoy the real world. Learn more about how to navigate an Internet snow day from this infographic!
