I live in the Washington, DC, area. That admission is the first step on the 12 step recovery process from Snow Panic Addiction.
Washington, DC LOVES nothing better than a snow panic. We close our schools, not when there is snow on the ground, but when it is still 200 miles away.
Just to give you a sense, this is what the snow looked like at 1:05 p.m. on Friday. And our schools had been closed for two days at that point.
In case you have been living in a bunker without communications like the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for the past week, the East Coast is in the middle of a MASSIVE! HISTORIC! EPIC! snowstorm. And even better, we in Washington, DC, are going to be the leaders in snow accumulation. Take that, Syracuse and Philadelphia and New York and Boston! Speaking of Kimmy Schmidt, that might be a good binge-watch during the storm.
We are calling this a #SnowMaggedon. Just because. It is better than our usual Washington, DC naming convention, “SnowGate.”
But before this storm, we had Wednesday night, and many outside the DC have confused this “storm” with what is going on now. The “storm” on Wednesday was about ½ inch of snow, at exactly the right time. Evening rush hour. And then…
Technically, this was CarMaggedon II – almost five years to the day after CarMaggedon I. This is a DC phenomenon we have about once every three years that dramatizes the delicate edge of traffic insanity upon which we live.
People coming home from work on Wednesday had 4, 5, and 6-hour commutes to go about 10 or 15 miles. Even President Obama was stuck in traffic for over an hour. Hundreds of accidents and traffic snarled everywhere.
Whenever things go this terribly wrong – often unpredictably and under the most modest of causes – it reminds me of the challenges of operating and maintaining systems at a massive scale.
99.9% of the time, DC traffic, while bad, is somewhat predictable. But chaos can enter into complex systems from the most benign of causes. I work in the IT industry, and it makes me think about the unbelievably complex and massive information systems that we rely on day in and day out without giving them a thought.
Every business, every organization, relies on complex information systems smoothly handling massive amounts of information, just like commuters rely on complex transportation systems to handle ever-increasing numbers of cars until they don’t.
At their core, modern organizations are systems of information networks. They rely on the smooth flow of information within and across networks. The information flowing through and across these networks is growing at a compounded rate of 50% per year. And like our transportation planners who think that the only solution to congestion is more roads, organizations think they can just add more and more storage to handle massively increasing volumes of information. Organizations are now looking at potential information Carmaggadons of their own. We call this “Information Chaos” -- I call it "Mancini's Law" -- and we published a free e-book about it last year.
For now, though, maybe I won’t worry about the snowstorm. I published an earlier version of this post on SlantNews yesterday, and since then, it has been snowing like a moose (technical term). This has actually turned out to be one of those snowstorms worth worrying about. Here is what it looks like right now (10 am Saturday), and it's still snowing.
Perhaps it’s time for a glass of wine and a Kimmy binge. Stay safe.