Measured Out in Coffee Spoons

The great IT God spits out a USB stick containing the prophesies of TWAIN

There was a power failure here at the office yesterday - about a year after the previous one. I got locked in the office last time after the security doors failed safe - with safe using the non-dictionary definition of "being unable to escape from somewhere with the potential for being very dangerous indeed." Last time it took an hour to bring the network back and as yesterday's failure happened half way through the afternoon, I decided to leave so as to avoid captivity and because I did not expect to be able to do any work at all. It all came back after forty minutes I'm told. I suppose I should feel guilty but I don't.

I am distracted by the story that a school caused "outrage" (those are tabloid quotes) because it moved the silence for the remembrance of The Armistice to 12:30 so as not to disrupt lessons saying that 12:30 was a more appropriate time. Now my knee-jerk reaction was to agree - it can't be very difficult to get everyone to stop what they are doing at the same time - especially at school - you have bells to coordinate everything anyway. After thinking about it for a while however, I changed my mind as I struggle to get excited about arbitrary milestones. In fact I begin to wonder if a specific two minutes for remembrance is actually just a sop to keep the realities of what happened out of mind for the rest of the year. I do not know if the time of 11:00 am was chosen for the purity of 11/11/11 - we are told it was to give time for the news of the ceasefire to reach the distant troops. After the realisation that many troops died after the Armistice was signed but before it came into effect, I cannot help asking why the order was not just given as "with immediate effect". Blind faith in these markers is just silly. A shrug is my general response to those occasional days when someone writes breathlessly about how this is the last time this century that we will see some particular accident of numbers in the date. And now we see the gathering buzz about the end of the Mayan Calendar and how that means the world is going to end. We even have a film about it. Watch the new-agers go berserk. The bottom line is that 2012 is the Mayans' Millennium bug - they just chose an arbitrary length for their calendar and couldn't see any reasons to extend it. Anyway, the Mayan civilization disappeared years ago - if it hadn't, I'm sure that there would have been extensive project-management meetings to decide on a solution.