28 Sep
2000
28 Sep
'00
12:26 p.m.
At 05:14 PM 9/28/00 -0400, Douglas Quebbeman wrote:
But money that requires a working network link in order
to be
used will never be acceptable to me. It's one thing to have to
wait a few minutes until they can make a connection (i.e. to get
a dial tone as I mentioned above); it's another to have to come
back the next day to make a purchase that's needed right _now_.
Here in southern Wisconsin, we recently had an outage where
(I think) a backhoe operator *stretched* a fiber cable, resulting
in an unusually difficult-to-patch series of breaks. Everything
was down in several counties for a long while: net, long-distance
between counties, city-to-city, ATMs, cellular. The local
bank would've given me cash if I'd known my account number
when I walked in, but my ATM card wasn't sufficient - an example
of how one number is better than another, I guess. :-)
- John