I did not know what being anxious meant till I travelled to Andaman and Nicobar islands a few years ago. Most of the island has very little network coverage, and your phone constantly scanning for it meant that it was draining the battery—100% to 20% in a few hours.
It’s not great to not have access to the internet when you are in charge of providing support if the system goes down. Not having access to the internet meant that if the servers were to go down or there was a significant issue, it would be a while until the system was back up. Not a good customer experience for a paid SaaS product.
I remember constantly checking my phone to see if there was network coverage to access my emails. If the servers did go down, my email would be alerted. I was constantly thinking about the systems being down rather than being in the moment. I could not wait to get back to the hotel, which had internet available if you stayed around the lobby. Nothing did go wrong in that one week. But the state of being anxious continued through the week.
I went hiking again this week, and as we drove off the road to get to the caves, we lost network coverage. No network for about seven hours. This time though, the experience was a bit different. Even though I was a bit anxious, I was not as worried as before. The system has been stable for quite a while now. I had taken the necessary steps to ensure that the backup system would kick in if the primary failed. Knowing more about DevOps has helped ease my mind about going on holidays without network coverage for a few hours.
Still a while to go so that I can live without internet for a few days.
