“When the world burns down, I want to be able to build it back up again. That’s why I’m in engineering. Things like this should just never, never happen,” said my roommate, cautiously peering out into the hallway. Or at least, that’s what I think she said; I must admit, I had some difficulty hearing her over the howls of frustration echoing throughout Gibson 2. Emanating from the lounge area (some of which have apparently been turned into quintuplets this year? My sympathies, Freshmen. That’s utterly insane.), I heard the now familiar crash of people throwing things against the wall in fits of rage. A red-eyed, somber group gathered in the hallway, completely beside themselves, unable to function. My God, I remember thinking to myself. Is this what we are reduced to?

It was the winter of my sophomore year, and we were in the middle of yet another internet blackout. For some reason, they were happening up to twice a week — sometimes for just 3 or 4 minutes, sometimes for up to 3 or 4 hours. This outage was particularly excruciating; Burning Crusade (an expansion for World of Warcraft) had just come out, and no one on our floor was able to log on. The result was absolute anarchy.

This formerly repressed memory was the first thing that came to mind as I read Elvis Montero’s article, “Strolling in The Cloud.” While it wasn’t an exact match to the situation he describes, my dorm-mates were hit with that same sense of desperation that the users of Amazon’s S3 did during its downtime. Clearly, they had no back up plan for entertainment that evening. Should Gmail go down again (or Yahoo! Calendar or SIS whatever it is that they need), I doubt they will fare any better. For that matter, I’m not sure I will either. I feel like extended outages of our favored web apps could be the thing to bring all of RIT to its knees.

Still, that might not be a bad thing. Did you know that goldfish lose their pigment if they don’t get enough sunlight? (See “At Your Leisure.”) Or that RIT has installed new, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks so that students can actually walk the loop around campus? (See “Deep Economy.”) When was the last time you spent an afternoon outside, anyway?

Better take advantage of this warm weather while you still can. You can back up your data some other afternoon.