OPINION I smile when I hear one of the relatively recent additions to the library of new-age clipped phrases and descriptions.
It is when I hear someone refer to an "IT issue".
I smile because I seem to hear it quite a lot.
The planet, as a whole, has "IT issues"because IT (information technology) has spread further and faster than our ability to control it and fully understand it.
For in the world of technology we have an awful lot of it, and some of it is incredibly complex and sophisticated ... it's just that we don't seem to have enough information about it.
Like when it goes wrong.
One could dab a spot of oil under the typewriter keys if they began to show signs of staging a go slow.
And you could always hit the top right button on the dear old manual cash register to open it ... if the power had gone off.
Cash registers ... do they still have them in this card-soaked age of eftpos?... which I think stands for electronic funds ... and something else.
I have been in two situations when the word emerges from the stricken counter attendant "sorry, the eftpos has gone down".
So it's cash or a cheque, although very few places will take a cheque today.
Kind of like when you walk back up the drive from the letterbox carrying a letter and one of the grandkids asks "what's that?"
Roger Moroney
Letters and cards are pretty much history now, although not in Russia by all accounts.
In this age of hacking, which has become a growth industry in some countries, flicking off an electronic message or letter or instruction of some sort can be tracked and traced, and once embedded in the electronic 'IT' landscape it sticks around despite the delete button having been activated.
In the political landscape that can be troublesome, can't it Donald?
So what do a lot of Russian agencies do today to defy the hackers?
They put their words on paper and send them off through the post in plain looking letters.
Only the writer and the recipient can see what is within, and if it is politically dodgy they can just flick it into the fire.
There is a positive side to everything though.
For in this expanding and seemingly uncontrollable landscape of information technology things can, and will, go wrong.
And when they go wrong, or something becomes just too complex to make sense of, you need someone who can fix it up.
So every major company has an IT department and there are independent IT specialists out there across this great confusing technology terrain.
Essentially, the numbers of people involved in creating and manufacturing IT devices is probably matched by the numbers of people who are required to keep them running.
Because if they don't it's probably fair to say that the number of people affected by some major outages is a few thousand times higher.
As it was last week when, and this is where a touch of irony emerges, a "communications" company's system crashed and disrupted thousands of people, here and in Australia, and some countries further afield.
Anyone who has gone through the check-in and boarding processes at an international airport at a very busy time knows how taxing and tiresome it can be even when everything is up and running.
The queues, the waiting, the queues ... the queues.
So when this IT factor, called Advance Passenger Processing system, suffers an outage, meaning all the processing has to be done manually, it all goes very, very pear shaped.
As crowds built up at Auckland International, and in airports like Melbourne, the messages went out saying no flights could be checked in "at the moment".
One long-waiting and weary passenger (he hoped he would eventually be a passenger) described the situation as "chaos".
Everything same to a standstill... but the only things that did not stop was the arrival of more people booked to fly, although they were unable to book in.
All the airline staff could do was hand out food and drink vouchers to the waiting masses.
There were "back-up" systems but they were unable to cater for the pressure from the growing back-log.
One IT outage, that's all it took to create a massive global glitch in getting on and off booked flights.
Maybe just print out a ticket, mail it to the traveller, and have someone at the airport stamp it and point the bearer toward the aircraft steps.
Naa, too simple.
* Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.
