Keep Your Cool

For the past four days, Entrepreneur's e-mail hasbeen out of whack. It started innocently-sort of-when the phonecompany came to our building and cut some wires as they"improved" our service. (That would have been fine, ifthey had bothered to tell us first.)

After that situation was rectified, everything seemed to fallapart. I still don't really understand why, but due to aconvergence (the anti-harmonic kind) of several factors, includingequipment and worms, we couldn't send or receive withreliability. I don't think we realized how dependent we are one-mail until this happened. Even the Luddites among us (and thereare still a few) were completely thrown by this. For us atEntrepreneur, e-mail is not just a communications tool, buta vital part of our production process. Freelance writers,photographers and illustrators who send their "products"via e-mail weren't able to get through. People working at homecouldn't reliably communicate with us here at the office.Newsletters we count on to keep us informed were lost in space.It's four days after the you-know-what hit the fan, and thingsare still not back to normal.