Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Ship Anchor…

You know the tale. A butterfly flaps its wings in China and it affects political events in the USA. We are definitely part of a global economy. Events there affect us here. In the article “Internet outage in Mideast, Asia felt in NJ” by Kelly Heyboer inThe Star-Ledger (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/01/internet_outage_in_mideast_asi.html) it describes how a ship’s anchor dragging across the sea floor damaged two underwater cables carrying vital internet traffic to parts of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The Internet disruption affected the Dubai stock exchange and posed a challenge for companies in India that rely on internet connectivity. At TutorVista we noticed it right away. On any given day, a particular tutor’s internet, power or computer can be down. You know how it is when you have a power failure or your cable TV connection is down because of a storm. These things can happen.

If we don’t see a tutor in place and ready to go shortly before they are scheduled to do a tutoring session, we automatically activate an alternate tutor so the session goes off without a hitch. It’s part of the redundancies we build into our business. What else do we do? Our tutors come from 23 major cities across India and a half dozen other countries so a storm or other problem affecting one city or a group doesn’t affect all our tutors. We can easily transfer traffic from tutors in Mumbai, for example, to ones in the Philippines.

We’re definitely part of a connected, global supply chain. Things that happen in one part of the world do affect people in another. But this isn’t a new concept. We know that freezing weather in Florida can affect orange juice prices and availability across the US. I remember years ago when there was a peanut butter shortage for some reason.

We are one week into this internet disruption from the anchor. We continue to reassign tutoring sessions to tutors with good connectivity out of our vast workforce. But that’s consistent really with the power and design of the internet in the first place. There’s a zillion paths an internet packet or message can take. Disruptions and roadblocks along the way are a fact of life and the beauty of the internet is it’s designed to deal with that.

Today it’s a boat anchor. Tomorrow it might be a storm, a strike…who knows. But just like the mailman’s creed, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night shall keep me from my appointed rounds” the tutoring will happen!

Dr. John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com