Lost Connections Can Cause Havoc

You may have seen the recent headline in the Bismarck Tribune, Sanford Health targeted by cyber hackers.  Sanford Health President and CEO Bill Gassen  stated, "We have engaged leading IT security experts to assist in the response,  and have notified and will be working closely with federal authorities."

As some of you may know, besides hanging out with you in the afternoons on COOL, I also work for Sanford.   Let me tell you, it has been an interesting couple of days.   We have been told to print out schedules, print out various forms that you would normally just sign the little electronic box, calendars for the week, insurance forms and so on and so on.  We are going to possibly have a company wide computer system reboot and we have to be ready to continue caring for our patients.

As I was killing trees, making numerous copies I got to thinking how tied to computers, cell phones, online business etc, we are.   Lots of information is stored in our cell phones.  Do you have all those contacts written down?  Do you have all those phone numbers memorized?  Or the registers in stores, restaurants, gas stations, salons etc...when they go down, we go back to writing food orders to pass to the kitchen, we pull out calculators to add up items,  hoping we can still get into the drawer to make change, since the credit card machine is probably down too.

People get frustrated when cable tv is down or the wifi is not connecting, what if the entire world lost the internet?  It's a scary thought.  We would be forced to talk to each other instead of text.  We would have to pull out paper and pencil and mail letters in an envelope vs send an email.  But it might just make us slow down a bit too.