As someone who also lives in Australia, OS travel is absolutely stressful, we don't do it as often like other countries and Europe, US are a long way away which makes it all the more stressful.
Absolutely, lots of systems need to interface and things need to go well to avoid friction, but often is the case that I have over prepared and I didn't need to worry.
I find comfort in that millions of people travel every day and problems will happen and there is usually always a way to solve it. As long as you have the basics, you've got to have faith it will work itself out.
Not only for travel, but everyday chores I try to make sure I have fallback, i.e. lavishly printout everything and file the old fashioned way. When traveling I print everything and in duplicate which I put in each of our carry-on bags and sometimes a third into the laptop case.
There is a book "The Machine Stops" - and we see glimpses of the scenario, e.g. the couple of recent bank network failures which left point-of-sale systems inoperable as well as ATMs. Recently MyID.gov.au was down and locked out all who followed the security recommendation to remove all username logins on my.gov.au.
Our IT systems work most of the time, but they certainly don't meet the 5 nines criteria. It is not a technical issue, it is a management issue. Executive management should be personally liable for failures. The slap on the wrist corporate penalties don't address the core issues. And those penalties are ultimately paid for by the customers, the very people adversely affected in the first place.
As someone who also lives in Australia, OS travel is absolutely stressful, we don't do it as often like other countries and Europe, US are a long way away which makes it all the more stressful.
Absolutely, lots of systems need to interface and things need to go well to avoid friction, but often is the case that I have over prepared and I didn't need to worry.
I find comfort in that millions of people travel every day and problems will happen and there is usually always a way to solve it. As long as you have the basics, you've got to have faith it will work itself out.
Not only for travel, but everyday chores I try to make sure I have fallback, i.e. lavishly printout everything and file the old fashioned way. When traveling I print everything and in duplicate which I put in each of our carry-on bags and sometimes a third into the laptop case.
There is a book "The Machine Stops" - and we see glimpses of the scenario, e.g. the couple of recent bank network failures which left point-of-sale systems inoperable as well as ATMs. Recently MyID.gov.au was down and locked out all who followed the security recommendation to remove all username logins on my.gov.au.
Our IT systems work most of the time, but they certainly don't meet the 5 nines criteria. It is not a technical issue, it is a management issue. Executive management should be personally liable for failures. The slap on the wrist corporate penalties don't address the core issues. And those penalties are ultimately paid for by the customers, the very people adversely affected in the first place.