tales from an ordinary world

2002-01-22

"I've been waiting for tomorrow
all of my life"
Matt Johnson

There's this place that I think of as the White Room, that we go to now and then for disaster-recovery testing. It's somewhere down in Fisherman's Bend or thereabouts, and I spend all day there, doing little more than waiting for backup tapes to yield their data and a bit of post-restoration stuffing around. It's about as exciting as it sounds, but like going to the dentist and all those other things people don't really like doing, It's For Your Own Good, and You'll Thank Me Later. Honest.

Like any other machine room, the White Room doesn't have windows. There's nothing to distract you here, apart from the hum of the air conditioning and perhaps the way the equipment's all lined up like real estate. Patch panels, colour-coded cabling, the odd flashing light (green's most popular, I reckon), hot-swappable hard disks with large inviting handles and pull-out keyboards that've been squished so they'll fit into the width of a standard rack. Over by one of the walls, a CD player sits plugged into the PABX, and on top of it sits a CD case for some generic "on-hold" music, the cover depicting a yacht sailing in Sydney Harbour. Repeat after me - "my call is important, and a customer service representative will assist me as soon as possible."

Occasionally I'll step outside and stare at the container yard or the huge trucks passing by, down on the main road. But it feels like I'm on another planet, or perhaps like I'm shipwrecked. The sensible part of my head points out that I'm not particularly far away, but even so I'm chained here and there really isn't much to do, apart from what I'm supposed to be doing.

I've been sitting in my room, watching the ice melt into my Cointreau while Barry Adamson does something to my ears.

It's business as usual.