Writing this the night of the day the US stock market fell so fast at the open that the exchange-level circuit breakers fired, a 7% drop in minutes, trading halted for a cooldown, the first such halt since 1997, as an oil price war (Saudi-Russia, choosing this week) collided with the pandemic repricing that last entry said one of the two dashboards was owed. Italy expanded its lockdown nationwide today. The WHO will likely use the P-word within days. The two-dashboards divergence has resolved the way divergences always resolve (slow charge, dead-short discharge).
The fire drill happened, and the pre-registered predictions grade as follows: VPN capacity, correct, saturated by 9:40am, emergency license upgrade purchased by noon (cheap fix, glad we found it on a Tuesday). Meeting culture, correct, our all-hands format collapsed without a room to read. The unlisted gap, the prediction’s real winner: onboarding. We have two engineers starting Monday and every step of their first week assumed a desk, a badge, and a human pointing at things. Rebuilt it in 72 hours as documents and scheduled pairing calls. The drill cost a Tuesday; the findings are about to be load-bearing for… a duration I no longer estimate in weeks.
The office goes remote-default Wednesday. I moved the team’s monitors home myself in my car, which is not in the staff-engineer job description, but the job description was always just “whatever the system needs that has no other owner.”
TIL: circuit breakers as mechanism, since today demanded it. Exchange halts exist to break feedback loops between automated selling and priced-in panic: forced cooldown as load shedding for collective cognition (the old 1202 alarm, but for civilization). We’re all going to need bigger cooldowns.