It is, of course, the oldest cliché in the book that you don’t know what you have until you don’t have it. Since early yesterday (Thursday, June 24, 2004) morning, the email system at Case Western Reserve University has been completely broken. There was a catastrophic failure of the disk storage servers that handle the email and other applications. They are supposedly working on it round the clock to fix it.

It’s hard to contemplate the tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity that have been spent here in the last two days. Also, apparently messages sent to the system are being bounced back to the sender. I had evidence of that earlier in the day from one of my regular correspondents, who happened to also have my personal address. I also don’t think that my messages are going out either.

What a mess.