… you got sick…. I mean really sick – not just ‘I’ve got the ‘flu’ sick.
Or
Your computer broke down?
Or
Your internet provider had a problem?
Or
Any number of other random events happened which meant that you couldn’t get online for longer than a 24 hour period?
Would the world stop turning?
Probably not.
Could you lose a whole lot of money?
Maybe
Could you completely lose your credibility with your fellow providers, clients and important contacts?
Absolutely.
There have been a couple of cases recently that have really made me stop and think about the ‘cyber’ world that we live in.
In the first instance I was using the services of one of the companies that I use for article submissions. It was all going well, when suddenly nothing, nada, the Paypal payment kept on going out, but nothing was getting done. So I contacted one of the guys running the show and he hadn’t heard anything either and assumed that he had been left in the lurch as much as me, except that he was more out of pocket than I was.
Paypal transaction cancelled, company put on hold until ‘further notice’ reputation down the gurgler etc etc.
Turns out the guy we were dealing with had had a heart attack and was in ICU for 2 months fighting for his life.
The second event was when my computer decided that the small stone that had been sitting quite happily within the laptop casing was actually a problem that needed the fan to remove it – one smashed fan later I was told that the repair would take 2-3 days.
Fortunately I had a lot of ghostwriting work on and managed to get a loaner computer that would also connect through to the internet.
4 weeks later my laptop was returned and I was thanking my luck stars. If I had not had the loaner I was going to be in a pile of poop myself!
It got me thinking just how reliant we are on a small device, a thin cable and the sites that connect us all.
These days we are connecting online just a genuinely as we are offline, but what would you do if the thing that connected you suddenly couldn’t? If you have friends or contacts on forums, what would you do if that forum ceased to exist? What would happen to your friendship if you got sick and couldn’t get to the site? What would your clients think and say about you if you went offline inexplicably?
What plan ‘B’ have you got in place for your business?
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Hey Rach, Great post. I agree, you need to be very careful with that. Have a backup plan in place. I recently did a post myself talking about what would happen if something were to happen to you. We never want to think about what would happen if something bad were to come up, but we should always have a backup plan just in case, especially when you are running services where you have money belonging to clients in your account.
Absolutely – there is so much stuff to remember and we rely on that internet connection so much that it is easy to forget that often we can’t just ring the customer (or our friends) when things are going pear shaped! Nice to see you again James thanks for the comment