There’s something calming about having things stable, everything working as you’d expect it to, nothing screaming, things just ticking along.

Then…

• Email: We’re changing your policy
• Text: Just to let you know, this critical service won’t be available this weekend
• Email: Notification of price increases
• Email: Your account that you need for something is about to expire, log in with a password you made 3 years ago
• App: We’ve improved the layout by moving the button you use every day
• Email: Important changes to your terms and conditions, hidden somewhere in this PDF
• Website: For your security, please verify your identity using the phone number you no longer have
• Letter: Your payment is changing
• Bank: We noticed activity on your account
• Portal: Your session has expired because you took longer than 30 seconds to find the document

There’s no disaster, but now there’s 10 little things you need to keep track of, 10 things that need attention, 10 things you need to take action for, until the next 10 arrive, it feels like it never ends, and now you’re running at 98% memory used.

And then, somehow, there’s gaps, things stabilise again, and we’re back to calm.

Then life throws a “restart required” with no patch notes, a full-on disrupt-everything style event.

• A house move
• A job change
• A health scare
• A car problem
• A family thing
• A surprise bill

Some big admin thing that lands in your carefully put together operating system that says:

“Updates are ready to install”

Maybe the update can be postponed for a while. Maybe you can execute it cleanly. Maybe the system just restarts itself without warning.

Everything in this post has happened to me, and I’m sure many of you, at some point, but the key point is, we’re still functioning.

We need maintenance from time to time. Sometimes we need some downtime.

But the calm isn’t gone forever.

Sometimes it’s just waiting on the other side of a restart.