Complying with Finagle's Law

Finagle's law elaborates on Sod's law: not only will anything that can go wrong, go wrong, but it will do so at the worst possible time.

With our self-imposed end of month deadline fast approaching, October's awareness module was close to being completed ... until a hardware failure caused a day's delay. A solid state disk drive gave up the ghost without warning last night. Naturally being highly security-aware we have backups, lots of backups, but rebuilding/restoring the system on a new disk inevitably takes time. Bang went my Saturday!

October's module is entirely new, being a new awareness topic for us, so it has taken longer than normal to prepare the module, leaving little slack in our schedule. Such is life. So, tomorrow I'll be slogging through what remains of the weekend, doing my level best to catch up and complete the materials for delivery on Monday, hopefully.

On the upside, our backups worked! We had enough spare hardware to survive this incident with relatively little impact except a day's lost work and elevated stress levels. An unplanned business continuity exercise.