QotD: Things Are Different Now Edition...

The late 1990s were only twenty years ago. Gas was less than a buck a gallon. Also, you could watch TV for days without hearing about our crumbling infrastructure. Some folks saw things looming on the horizon, though...

"In meetings at work during the run-up to Y2K, I made a number of suggestions about power conditioning and UPSes. They were pretty routine and most of them were implemented before the year 2000. In making them, I pointed out the power-distribution infrastructure was aging and there was a lot of construction around our two main sites, concluding, "we may be entering a time when commercial power is less reliable that we're used to." There was much harrumphing at that crazy notion. Now we're getting two or three glitches on the power every week, and ugly hits that take a fair amount of rebooting slam us a dozen times a year, despite a big UPS that carries the critical loads. I'm not happy about being proved right."